need a private publisher for my book

[Effete Snob]

3. You are paying them to copy the art and sell it to you

Book Baby is not your friends and family. They are a business that is going to sell you a book they printed. In order to print that book and sell it to you, they need permission of all the copyright owners pertaining to the contents of the book.

YOU might not be selling it, but they certainly are selling it to you.

Aside from which, copyright law does not care if you are selling it or not. Copyright law is about the right to make copies, period, which is what you are asking them to do.

The kind of "personal use" exemption that grew up around people making their own backups of things, or time-shifted viewing of broadcasts, does not extend to you and 99 clones of you.

If you copy material which is subject to copyright, and give that copy to someone else, you are certainly violating the copyright. All that music filesharing that went on in the early 2000's was free too, and was just people sharing their own copies. It does not matter.

Now, you *might* have a fair use argument if you nail all the factors for that, such as only copying as much as needed for comment, criticism, etc., but the publisher is not going to sign on to your legal defense for you since they are the ones doing the copying.

But giving away free copies of something doesn't excuse copying material which is subject to copyright. Never has.