Some publishing matters about characters?

[Steven J Pemberton]

I'm not sure what you think the problem might be. Some publishers are stuck in the 19th century, and will refuse to publish anything that's already been offered to the public by any means whatsoever. But unless this is a comic book or a children's story, it's not going to have pictures of the characters, so what you've done doesn't count as publishing the book. If there's nothing to connect the pictures to the book, it doesn't matter anyway.

If your book gets published, the artist might want some of the money. But unless you included the pictures in the package you sent to the publisher, the pictures won't have influenced the publisher's decision to publish, so the artist isn't entitled to anything.

The only way I can see it causing problems is if the publisher decides to commission another artist to draw pictures of the characters, your artist might argue that he should get that job. If the new pictures look a lot like the old pictures, your artist might argue that the publisher's artist must have copied from him, and he therefore deserves some of the money. Though both artists would have drawn from your descriptions of the characters, so of course the pictures are going to look similar. The only evidence for copying from the old pictures would be if they both had elements that you didn't describe.