A SWOT analysis of publishing

If someone was considering (trade) publishing as a career, what might they take into account?

Note that some of these points are based on my best guesses, so if you’re here because you’ve got a job offer, do do your own research into a company as they might have very different policies and culture. I know all of this hasn’t always applied to the companies I’ve worked at.

Strengths

As an industry:

• Product has mass appeal — anyone who can read is a potential customer
• Product is cheaply priced, so customer base potentially broad
• Cheap labour

As a career:

• Pleasant white-collar work that involves reading and talking about books with like-minded people
• Low-pressure compared to something like banking or law
• Creative (once you leave entry level)
• Collegiate environment with a sense of fun
• Possibility to meet interesting and famous people
• No particular training or qualification necessary to enter

Weaknesses

As an industry:

• Poor visibility of which products customers are likely to want to buy, before any time or money spend
• Slow production (a book can take over a year to publish), so vulnerable to trends changing faster than you can respond to
• Unusually favourable arrangements with customers (such as long returns periods and having to pay for space and promotions in shops) makes forward-planning and sales forecasting difficult
• Low pay makes attracting top people hard
• Homogeneity of workforce (largely white, British, female, middle-class and left-leaning) could lead to groupthink and therefore missing threats and opportunities

As a career:

• Low pay all the way until very senior positions
• Limited number of entry-level jobs, so competition is tough
• Working on your own time common
• Poor amount-of-work/hours-in-the-day ratios in many jobs
• Not usually flexible enough for working parents
• London-centric

Opportunities

As an industry:

• Monetising content in new ways — for example, apps based on diet books
• Parts of society still to convert into readers if appealing content can be produced (for example, more children’s books with BAME lead characters)
• Audiobooks are proving to be one good way to find new readers in people who were previously not interested in print books
• Better sales and market research could improve success rate of products

As a career:

• Bringing new skills into a old-fashioned industry can give you an edge — especially data interpretation and manipulation
• Skills are transferable — copy writing and editing will stay relevant in the internet age

Threats

As an industry:

• Strong downward trend of book sales over many years
• Self-publishing — traditional publishers’ punishing terms may lead to loss of authors to more attractive alternatives
• Readers beginning to prefer short-form content to long-form
• Amazon becoming more monopolistic

As a career:

• Depending on the job, may be vulnerable to being automatised or switching to freelancers