Have you ever caught yourself banging away at a keyboard and daydreaming of doing a publisher's job for them? Ah, the smell of toner cartridges, the hours of toiling over a steaming Adobe product... Honestly, is there anything more to life? You, sir, may just get your wish if you are endeavoring to write a travel guidebook or a children's picture book. That's right. Peruse through the submission guidelines for publishers that print such material and you are bound to find many saying one of two things: (1) don't bother because the industry is saturated with this crap no one reads, and (2) send dummy. If you've been reading hundreds of listings and advice articles about the publishing market and you're feeling a bit bleary, you might furrow your caffeinated brow and think, What did he just call me?
No, a dummy is a real term used for an element of your manuscript submission to agents/editors. Sooner or later, aspects of this industry were bound to be renamed to make the writer feel belittled. Next thing you know, you'll have an agent shredding open a manilla envelope with her raptorial claws and spitting in disgust, "I can't believe these hacks! This guy gave me his manuscript, his SASE, his dummy, his moron, and his scumbag, but why would he be so stupid as to not send his freakin' douche nozzle?!"
A dummy is a mock version of your book as you envision it, so the agent/editor can visualize how you intend the book to appear. This is basically requested any time your writing will feature a strong visual component. Here, you get to form a "rough" mock-up of the page layouts so the agent/editor can see how the images will interact with the text. There are various ways of doing this, and although you might consider sending a dummy that is simply scribbled madness, somewhere etched into the pit of a writer's soul is the law of nature which states that all work submitted before the royal eyes of agents/editors needs to be meticulously polished. That means your rough mock-up will turn out to be the product of hundreds or even thousands of hours of layout design.
This probably means you need to buy Adobe Creative Suite, one that includes InDesign. This software on its own is astronomically expensive and is the leading cause of neck injuries resulting from double-takes. You can try different software, but they don't all work the same and they don't all save work as the same or compatible file formats. For example, Microsoft Publisher only saves as .pub and no other software is compatible. There are various freewares you can download, such as Scribus and Fatpaint, but they also may not save the work in a compatible format. The dummy isn't going to be submitted electronically, of course, but if the editor likes your layouts the way you have them, they will then ask for your file so they can play with it, and therefore the file needs to be something they can open with their program, likely Adobe InDesign. QuarkXPress is still the major competitor for Adobe on this, but it's becoming less popular in the publishing world because Adobe sends men in black suits to advertising agencies and the homes of graphic designers to rough up the buyers and break the QuarkXPress CDs in half.
At your own risk, here is a good list that compares the various open source/freeware desktop publishing programs for those who are attempting to start working on their dummies on a tight budget, alongside those with definitively for-profit software such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. That list also compares the import/export file type capabilities for each.
Some really good tutorials on how to use the various components of the Adobe Creative Suite can be found on YouTube.
There are many more, of course, so keep searching and tinkering until you learn the techniques you need to make your dummy the way you want it. Essentially, you're building a book, from start to finish, including the table of contents and the customary empty pages at the front and back.
You know how you're taught that when you submit a manuscript, you need to make it all Times New Roman, size 12, with the title in size 12 caps, and maintain one-inch margins? Forget all that. Here, you'll need to decide when to wrap text around an image, or have an illustration bleed onto the next page. You'll need to format the sections and their headings. The good part is that InDesign allows you to create a master layout and apply it to all pages in different sections.
Here is a book that may help: it's called Writing with Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children's Books by Uri Shulevitz, but you can see just by its name that it might be limiting when used for other types of writing. As you work, you should organize all your illustrations and photographs in one folder, possibly with subfolders. And to make it look really spiffy when you send it away, you may want to get it professionally printed. Keep in mind that you usually send your non-dummy manuscript as well, so you might want to work on the writing phase with two saved files, one which will later be bastardized to form the dummy.
No, a dummy is a real term used for an element of your manuscript submission to agents/editors. Sooner or later, aspects of this industry were bound to be renamed to make the writer feel belittled. Next thing you know, you'll have an agent shredding open a manilla envelope with her raptorial claws and spitting in disgust, "I can't believe these hacks! This guy gave me his manuscript, his SASE, his dummy, his moron, and his scumbag, but why would he be so stupid as to not send his freakin' douche nozzle?!"
A dummy is a mock version of your book as you envision it, so the agent/editor can visualize how you intend the book to appear. This is basically requested any time your writing will feature a strong visual component. Here, you get to form a "rough" mock-up of the page layouts so the agent/editor can see how the images will interact with the text. There are various ways of doing this, and although you might consider sending a dummy that is simply scribbled madness, somewhere etched into the pit of a writer's soul is the law of nature which states that all work submitted before the royal eyes of agents/editors needs to be meticulously polished. That means your rough mock-up will turn out to be the product of hundreds or even thousands of hours of layout design.
This probably means you need to buy Adobe Creative Suite, one that includes InDesign. This software on its own is astronomically expensive and is the leading cause of neck injuries resulting from double-takes. You can try different software, but they don't all work the same and they don't all save work as the same or compatible file formats. For example, Microsoft Publisher only saves as .pub and no other software is compatible. There are various freewares you can download, such as Scribus and Fatpaint, but they also may not save the work in a compatible format. The dummy isn't going to be submitted electronically, of course, but if the editor likes your layouts the way you have them, they will then ask for your file so they can play with it, and therefore the file needs to be something they can open with their program, likely Adobe InDesign. QuarkXPress is still the major competitor for Adobe on this, but it's becoming less popular in the publishing world because Adobe sends men in black suits to advertising agencies and the homes of graphic designers to rough up the buyers and break the QuarkXPress CDs in half.
At your own risk, here is a good list that compares the various open source/freeware desktop publishing programs for those who are attempting to start working on their dummies on a tight budget, alongside those with definitively for-profit software such as Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. That list also compares the import/export file type capabilities for each.
Some really good tutorials on how to use the various components of the Adobe Creative Suite can be found on YouTube.
How To Use Adobe InDesign CC For Beginners
InDesign Advanced Course
There are many more, of course, so keep searching and tinkering until you learn the techniques you need to make your dummy the way you want it. Essentially, you're building a book, from start to finish, including the table of contents and the customary empty pages at the front and back.
You know how you're taught that when you submit a manuscript, you need to make it all Times New Roman, size 12, with the title in size 12 caps, and maintain one-inch margins? Forget all that. Here, you'll need to decide when to wrap text around an image, or have an illustration bleed onto the next page. You'll need to format the sections and their headings. The good part is that InDesign allows you to create a master layout and apply it to all pages in different sections.
Here is a book that may help: it's called Writing with Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children's Books by Uri Shulevitz, but you can see just by its name that it might be limiting when used for other types of writing. As you work, you should organize all your illustrations and photographs in one folder, possibly with subfolders. And to make it look really spiffy when you send it away, you may want to get it professionally printed. Keep in mind that you usually send your non-dummy manuscript as well, so you might want to work on the writing phase with two saved files, one which will later be bastardized to form the dummy.