Ordering a Picture Book Dummy

Coming from the world of advertising, we’re used to putting together “Pitch Books” to present and sell our ideas. So, as our first milestone, the goal was to get a few pages to full color and the rest just blocked out in rough pencils. Enough to showcase the story and give an impression for where we want to take it.

As we started researching how to publish and get representation, we found out that there is actually an industry term for exactly what we created, called a “dummy.” Ironically, we felt smart.

While it seems less and less common for agents to request hard copies, we really like having these on hand just in case. Plus, even if an agent never requests one, it’s still pretty rad to have physical book to read to our little boogers (see: kids).

For those interested, we printed them with Printivity. We used Adobe InDesign to format the document into a multi-page PDF that conformed to their print specs. It was a relatively quick, easy process and they cost roughly $30 per dummy for our small run of 10.

And who knows, maybe one day these will be collectors items.