About Graphic novels, Books and Stories in general

Hey, everyone.
Long time without a social call, so here it is, and it's going to be a lengthy one.
Mostly I would like to get some feedback on the things I'll mention below, and if you have dealt with anything similar, it would be nice if you could share your experience.


So, I'm slowly working on my story ("slowly" is an understatement), and it's getting to the point where I'm thinking about the different ways I could release it. I'm still far away from finishing it, but it can't hurt gathering info right now.

First of all, about the actual "look" of the book. It's definitely not going to be a comic book or anything like that. Not that I hate comics but that's not what I had in mind for my project. My story will have a lot of text, a lot of narrative, you'll have to actually read it and not just browse through the pictures.
Here's what I thought 2 pages might look like:



It's just a test page with an older artwork and gibberish as text, but it should give you an idea (again, tell me what you think).

Basically, it will be something like: 50% of the pages are images and the other half is text. However, it'll be still possible to read the story without the art. The images are simply accompanying the narration, they are not crucial to the story, but they do give you some additional visual detail about what's going on, etc.
Anyway, if it turns out to be 200 pages long, that's kinda like a short story with a lot of illustrations. I will also make sure that the images won't ever spoil the text part before you can even read it, so don't worry about that.
Sometimes there will be 2 pages together with only text, sometimes there will be an artwork across 2 pages, the test page above is just an example of 1 image-page + 1 text-page. But yeah, that's all about the way it might look, now about the actual final product...

My first thought was to do it the usual standard way, basically just finish it, polish it up, make it into a book and sell on Amazon or something. I'm not sure if that would be ideal for me, so, again, if you've tried to publish books yourself, if you know how successful/pointless it can be, how much money the average author makes on Amazon, I'd like to hear about it.

The second option I wouldn't mind trying is to make a website for the book and just put out a digital version of the book for free, where anyone could read it. I would be selling printed copies as well, in case anybody wanted them (obviously I can't give them away for free), but you could read the digital version on the net and perhaps donate money if you liked it, etc etc.
Whether people would actually donate is another question... but from what I've seen from other projects, if it's good, people don't mind supporting it. 
I'm also not so much about the money, I would just like for as many people as possible to read my story, however, this is taking me a long time to do, so I can't just throw it out there without any chance for compensation.
Personally, I'm leaning towards something like this second option, because if it works out semi-well, I will just keep doing it (releasing stuff for free). This also allows for it to spread better, meaning that if someone wouldn't be able to buy the book, he/she can still share it with others, because it's free and accessible.


What would you prefer, would you mind buying a book like that or read it for free beforehand? Or do you have different suggestions altogether?
I haven't done anything like that, so any thoughts or opinions are welcome.