I’m used to rejection. I’m a queer man! I get it from parents, dates, homophobes on the bus, and, of course, as a writer, from publishers.
But after lots of rejection for my idea for a book about foot fetishes, I knew I had to find a way to get a literal foot in the door of the book publishing industry.
I’m nearly 40, and not a single one of the novels I’ve written has been published. That’s just the flow of life: sometimes a yes, often a no.
My struggle to find a publisher for my book about our fetish for feet hit me especially hard. After all, I had already published a book about the history of poppers, Deep Sniff. Tackling foot fetishes next had seemed like a perfectly reasonable next step.
I remember the night I converted the foot fetish book from an idea into a plan. I was at a party in the pub for my friend’s birthday when his colleague mentioned reading Deep Sniff.
Something about the person being my friend’s colleague brought out the inner child in me, and I told him I’d been playing with the idea of a book about a fetish for feet.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t as shocked as I childishly wanted him to be. But after months of thinking about it, I’d said the idea aloud—and something compelled me to try to make it happen.
So I devised a plan to put me on a collision course with the Publishing Industry.
First I had to get my ideas straight, as it were. Publishing a book is a very long process, and the first phase is a great deal of unpaid research, thinking and writing. I began to collect stories, references and pictures of the history.
I built up a ‘Foot mega doc’. I downloaded countless PDFs and bought second-hand books. I went on a writing retreat. I loved all this work, and I came away with two long chapters, a pitch, and a plan for the full book, ready to send to agents and editors.
Just after I landed home, Deep Sniff won the Polari First Book Prize, so I quickly added that asset into the proposal. I wasn’t arrogant, but momentum was building and I thought my plan had a good shot.
One publisher I was friendly with said it was too mainstream for them. Another said it was too niche. Most said, “it’s not a good fit for us”, which is a publishing euphemism for ‘we don’t like it and/or we can’t sell it’. I lost sleep over whether to upsell or downgrade the fact that a fetish for feet is one of the most common.
It’s hard to be unsure about whether your idea and your work is any good. It’s hard to be judged by others, who are judged in turn by others (bosses, investors, social media warriors).
It’s hard to know that you could do a good job, if only given the runway. It’s hard to work for nothing on the promise that it might turn into something - and watch it stay as nothing. Writing is hard, but publishing is harder.
Somewhat defeated, I made myself busy with other projects—more writing, mostly.
And then a chance came, in the form of a call out for the Inklings series from the excellent indie publisher 404 Ink. I had to re-conceive it as a much shorter book to fit their criteria—and they accepted it.
The lesson from this isn’t necessarily to stick it out until ‘it gets better’—that’s clichéd and undermines the hard work people put into getting their ideas out there all the time.
Instead, my lesson from getting my foot fetish book published is this: if the industry isn’t taking your work even though you believe in it and enjoy the writing process, what other choice do you have but to write?
Sometimes it means working away on one thing for years; sometimes, it means fitting what one publisher wants; always, it relies on you doing the work of writing. And the joy of that work is what it’s all about anyway.
Solemates: A History of Our Fetish for Feet is out now.
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