Sometimes it’s hard to say exactly when or how a story idea originated, but for my upcoming picture book We Match! — illustrated by Sharon Glick and coming from Astra Young Readers on July 15 — I remember both the when and the how.

At a cabin on a little lake in December 2011 (yes, over 13 years ago), I noticed a coincidentally color-coordinated little pack of unrelated lake dogs.

If I took a picture of them that day, I can’t find it. But these photos from subsequent visits to that cabin — after my dog Ernie had joined our family (and occasionally the lake pack) — provide a pretty good fascimile of what originally caught my eye.

By the end of February 2012, those dogs had inspired a picture book manuscript called Matching Dogs. Here’s how it began:

As the story progressed, there were six dogs repeatedly rearranging themselves based on qualities they have in common, such as their stances on sweaters, squirrels, and solicitors.

That was a lot of generically named characters and a lot of movement to keep straight, and I knew that my text alone wasn’t doing an adequate job. So by the end of 2012 I did something I’d never done before and haven’t done since. I created a dummy version of the entire book, by then renamed We Match (no exclamation point in the title yet).

Here are the opening pages of that picture book dummy:

And that was… pretty much where things stayed for the next decade. I’ll pick up the rest of the story behind We Match! another time. But in the meantime, I’ve got a request.

Please preorder We Match! from a bookseller, be it from your nearest and dearest physical store (you can just go right up to the information desk and tell them you’d like to place a preorder) or via an online seller such as Bookshop.org, which supports local, independent bookstores.

Here’s why preorders — even six months before the publication date — are important.

Preorders give booksellers an idea of how many copies they should stock for a particular title, or even whether they should carry that title at all.

Publishers use preorders to help determine how many copies of a book they should print, and when. The more copies printed, the more copies available for bookstores to display and sell.

And preorders are extremely helpful for authors like me. Writing books and talking about them at school visits and other events are how I make a living, and I count on folks like you to help me keep doing what I do.

Spreading the word about We Match! provides a boost, too. Whatever you can do to help welcome this book into the world in the months ahead, I truly appreciate.