Books - to publish? to self publish? iBooks?

I have written a couple of posts about my black book collection, which is largely a private thing. I am working on another book for publication, so thought I'd write about that process.

I have a published children's book, 'Kayla & the Magical Tree', which I created with the author Steve Stine in 2003. Lots of fun. It was a small print run but they can still be found on Amazon in the new and used section. You can see it here. It was unusual in that we worked on it together and then took it to a publisher - a wonderful way to work but rare I understand.

I have another book that I self-published on Blurb.com on colour mixing. It is 100 pages of watercolour mixes, visual images only. The preview is here. I like the fact that I can up-date it if I do another chart so the print-to-order is not a a bad idea on this one. I also like the space for notes to be added by the buyer to make it their own.

I also have a gorgeous book of my artwork covering over 30 years of drawing, painting, etching, calligraphy and so on that my husband made on Apple  - a lovely coffee table book that many of my students, friends and family have bought, though it is not publicly available. It would be nice to publish it...

My published and self-published books.

Now I am working on another book which will be on watercolour. A mixture of colour mixing, painting exercises, examples, tips and tricks set out as a series of lessons to take a beginner from setting up a palette to planning and painting their own work. 

But how to publish this one? It would be fun to make it an iBook with links to videos of techniques. It would be useful for my students and on-line tutoring. But there are so many books out there!

The other book in the wings is on sketching and sketchbooks. I have had all my plein air paintings and drawings professionally photographed but that also needs some thinking......More on this soon...