Self-Publishing Books and [Not] Giving Them to Others

In the last ten or so years since I returned to the writing obsession of my adolescence, I have created a number of books. 

I have two large bags of books I've made but never finished giving to people. 

My latest books are printed from pdf in color by a wonderful and helpful Fedex employee named Amy at about a ten-dollar unit cost. 

I have made books for others too, including for a coffeehouse reading series and for a Facebook poetry group, and my approach with those books was to sell them for a contribution to a charity, which in one case was a organization providing gender-affirmation counseling to GLBT youth. 

With the books of my own work, my fantasy has been to give them to anyone who wants one (kind of a stretch, maybe) and just ask the person to give ten dollars to a homeless person. 

I've known poets who were very aggressive about distributing their books, but I am bashful about it. Self-promotion feels incompatible with the impulse behind the writing, which is essentially autoerotic. 

I write for my own private pleasure.

If I were properly published, the publisher would presumably market and distribute the books in some way, but I believe the trouble of sending my stuff around would take the pleasure out of writing for me.

I have printed  eleven collections of villanelles (which I call Yokel songs) in quantities of no more than five each. 

What I would like to do starting now is bring books to meetings of poets such as the monthly Bird's Next meeting at Black's Coffee in my neighborhood, and just give books away to anyone who is willing to take one, or maybe ask the recipients to give 10 dollars to a homeless person or make a donation to the organization, Reclaim, which provides GLBT youth with access to therapy that will help them bolster their self-love and self-confidence.

I think the books are kinda purdy. 

Here are all of the Yokel books. 😂

The cover art is based on an image created by Arlo James Murie.