Work methods are the general and specific form of an author’s creative process of production, that is, the concrete way and means by which an author–whether writer, composer, scholar, or whatever–labors on a work, prepares it, conceives it, writes it down, and revises it. In many cases this process does not end when the author presents the work to the public in a printed or at least mimeographed form; the process may also continue later, for example during the preparation of a new edition of the work.