I will very soon have permission (at a fair fee) to use the illustrations that were done for two of my booklets for children.

I visited the Cape Town International Book Fair at the end of July this year, and Marjorie van Heerden, a leading member of the South African chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, was manning the SASCBWI stall. She is one of the artists who drew pictures for two of my booklets and she told me that although Macmillan had ‘bought’ her pictures for the books, the pictures remained her Intellectual Property. She's waiting for written confirmation from Macmillan that she can resume copyright on her pictures.

Marjorie has given me a very fair deal to use her pictures if I go the self-publishing route and she’s drawn up a contract for me to sign.

Now I need to decide which way go to. If I find a publisher it becomes far more costly to use Marjorie’s pictures, but perhaps the publisher could come to an arrangement with Marjorie.

I’ve been through this before and Marit, you very kindly pointed me in the direction of a publishing house that was looking for stories. My hands were tied because I couldn’t get the pictures. By now the publishing house may well have what they needed.

There’s been a lot on the Writelink site about self-publishing and ebooks. Marit, you mentioned that self-publishing with Lulu is a good option, but it means receiving and despatching hard copy books. Would ebooks be a good alternative? What costs are involved and how does one go about it?

There are many more of my booklets and several artists were involved in illustrating them. I’ll have to get in touch with each artist in order to use their pictures. I’ll start with just two booklets.

It’ll take me ages to find the relevant posts on the Writelink site, and I’d appreciate pointers to where they are. Information about personal experience would also be very welcome.

Many thanks.

If you go down the e-book route, it's no problem. Smashwords charge nothing and put the book in all formats, taking a 20% cut of the cover price, but smashwords admit that they're nt the best in the world at handling images.

There's another BUT and it's a big one.

Children don't usually own the kind of tehcnology that reads e-books. The Kindle is about £200 in the UK and the Sony reader comes in at a similar price. The iPad is even worse, currently retailing for about £400 in the UK.

When it comes to lulu, illustrations can hype the cost of the book, especially if they're colour. I planned to sell DW's Guide to Holidays through lulu but the images jacked the production cost up to about £15. I'd have had to sell at £18-20 and no one would buy it at the price.

I know this is a bit negative, Patricia, but I can't think of a simple solution, unless you check out companies like Lightning Source who are really only printers.

I don't know what happened, but my entire post disappeared!

I'm pleased to hear that you're getting somewhere with the copyright problem and the illustrations for your books. I'm not sure whether the grey-scale wash (gouache or pen and ink?) is deemed black and white, but all black and white illustrations can be embedded in the pdf on the Vista version of Word. Black and white illustrations do not incur an extra cost with Lulu. Covers can be full colour.

An ISBN with Lulu is free, which means that the book will be made available on Amazon US and UK. The eBook version  - just set the price a little lower - is just a matter of selecting that you want it made available as a download as well and setting your price. So you get both the paperback version and the eBook. I can't think of a better way to do it, without incurring up-front cost.

Thanks for replying, David. Yes, it looks as if the ebook option is not an option for children's stories, although if it's a freebie, why not try? I'd wondered about children in other parts of the world having Kindles,etc instead of hard copy books. An expensive electronic gadget here seems to elevate a child's popularity amongst his peers and if an ebook publisher charges nothing and only a handful of readers buy in, it's better than nowt. I'll investigate the image quality, as that's important. Marit says Lulu doesn't charge for ebooks, so I'm reading up their other publishing options as well.

Many thanks for replying, Marit. Yeah - infuriating when stuff gets swallowed into somewhere else and you can't find it... . Thanks for your info about Lulu. I've been on the site and registered and will convert a story + pictures into a PDF file as a matter of interest. Some time ago you suggested a collection of stories instead of small booklets with single stories. That, I think is probably the most economical. I'll need to get permission from more artists, if I go that route, which will take more time but I think it'll be worth it if the artists' charges are realistic. I'll do a bit more research into SA options too. One GBP is SAR11.33 today.

All exciting stuff if I can make it work at last.