Pick the day, and it becomes about the two of you.

That is the whole point of the free preview. Upload a photo of each of you and see the two of you drawn, then on the cover with both your names, before you decide. No account, no card, nothing to cancel. One honest note: the preview is a first draft. Before anything is printed we check it page by page, and the printed book is sharper than what you see on screen.

A name-only book shows every couple the same two drawn strangers and drops in your names. Here the two of you are drawn from your photos, the same faces on the cover and all through the story. It is a thirty-page hardcover printed to order in the USA, and you see the two of you drawn, on the cover with your names, before you pay anything.

Your faces first: we draw the two of you from your photos and keep those same faces on the cover and all through the story. Your names go under the title and into the words, and the page after the story is yours to write, printed word for word. The story and the scenes around you are the same for everyone who picks this title, written and drawn before you arrive and approved page by page.

A landscape hardcover, 11 by 8.3 inches (280 by 210 mm), thirty pages on 170gsm coated silk paper, matte laminated cover, glued binding. Printed in the United States.

About six business days. Your book does not exist until you order it, so it has to be printed, bound and shipped, and we count the printing inside those six days. Ordering on a Thursday means it lands the week after, so leave room before a birthday. Shipping is $6.99 inside the US, and free on orders from $88.

For each person in the story, one clear shot of the face, looking roughly at the camera, in decent light. For a cat or dog, one daylight photo where their markings show. A phone photo is fine. A scan from an old album is fine too: the picture at the top of our home page is our founder in about 1992, scanned off film, and the character came straight from it.

We look at it once to build the character, and from then on the character is what travels through the book. Your photo is never printed on a page. Thirty days after your book ships it is deleted from our systems. Want it deleted sooner? Write to hello@dreamtalecartoons.com and we delete it, no reason needed.

Write to hello@dreamtalecartoons.com before it prints and we fix it for free, or cancel and refund you in full: books go to the printer shortly after you order, so write quickly. If it arrives damaged, send us a photo and we reprint it, and you keep the damaged one. If we got something wrong (a misspelled name, the wrong dedication, a printing fault), send us a photo and we reprint it at our cost, or refund you in full if you would rather.

You see the character before you pay, and that is the moment to tell us: write to hello@dreamtalecartoons.com and we redraw it. If you only notice once the book has arrived, write anyway and we will find a way to make it right. Likeness is the one thing we cannot get wrong, so we would rather you were fussy than polite.