Today, you will discover the amazing life cycle of that marvelous creature known as a book. To help your book thrive throughout its lifecycle, you must know where it is on its journey from birth to death. Identifying your book’s current stage of life will tell you how to help it thrive and when to let it go. Every book deserves a chance at a successful lifecycle, but authors can burn themselves out trying to beat a dead horse back to life.  How do you know when to keep marketing your last book and when to move on to the next book? Four Phases of a Book’s Lifecycle Phase 1: Creation You’re probably most familiar with the creation stage.  Education Creating a book typically starts with educating yourself about how to write a book. Perhaps you’ve read books or articles on how to write a book. Educating yourself keeps you from having to learn everything the hard way and helps you avoid common mistakes.  Listening to Novel Marketing or reading blog posts is a fantastic way to educate yourself about how to write a book. Research As you learn how to write a book, you learn how to research. Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, your book will require research. Nonfiction writers may research by reading other books or scientific studies on their topic. Novelists may research a certain period of history or travel to a real-world setting to experience it first-hand. Outlining Nonfiction writers typically outline the book’s structure via chapter titles, while fiction writers create an outline via plotting. Of course, discovery writers create their terrible first draft, which acts as an outline. Most discovery writers write a new draft from that terrible first draft.  Drafting If you’re working from an extensive outline, your next step is drafting. Drafting is where you write the book and create your rough draft. If you tend to combine the drafting and editing stages, check out our episode on How to Quiet Your Inner Editor to Draft Faster. Editing Editing requires multiple phases in a certain order: developmental editing, copy editing, line editing, typesetting, and proofreading. Each stage of editing has its own objective. Check out my episode on How to Hire a Good Editor to learn more about editing. Cover Design A book’s cover design is far more than the picture on the front. A printed book’s design will include the front cover design and type, back cover design and copy, spine, ISBN, barcode, and price. Your role in cover design is probably best spent perfecting your back cover copy. Good back cover copy will help your designer create a better image for the front. It will also serve as the starting point for the text on your Amazon page. * Effective Book Cover Design * How to Create a Design Brief for Your Book Cover