Publishers have to distill the books in their catalogue down to a single sentence. You can usually find these summaries on the copyright page. This is handy for librarians who often include these short descriptions in their on-line catalogues, but it’s also a tool for the people in marketing. Lisa Matthews, my editor at Peachtree calls this sentence “the nugget.” Ideally, it should make people think, “Wow! That sounds interesting.”

I learned about the value of having an interesting nugget in early 2002 when Lisa called to explain why she couldn’t make an offer on two of my sports novels. While the projects were humorous and well-written, their plots wouldn’t stand out enough to catch the attention of reviewers and librarians. “If there was an audience waiting for your next book,” she told me, “these would be ready to go.” Now that was a compliment that stabbed. I didn’t know what else I could do besides write well. But I found out a few minutes later when Lisa said, “You mentioned that you were writing a novel about a girl playing on a boy’s soccer team in Italy. How’s that coming?” About ten months after that question, the editor made an offer on my first novel, DEFENDING IRENE. Clearly, my comparatively exotic setting provided some of that “wow” factor for my soccer novel.

So what happens if you come up with a pretty good idea, but you’re not sure that it’s enough to attract the interest of reviewers and librarians? Agent Donald Maass suggests that great premises aren’t just discovered. They can be built by bringing together a combination of “plausibility, inherent conflict, originality, and gut emotional appeal.” He describes ways to do this in his book, WRITING THE BREAKOUT NOVEL. He recommends that writers spend time thinking about the premise early in the process instead of only discovering it when writing the query letter.

Originality might seem difficult to come by in a world where Ronald Tobias has written a book called TWENTY MASTER PLOTS AND HOW TO BUILD THEM. But in the end, even the classic Cinderella story can feel fresh and original when given an interesting twist. For example, Gail Carson Levine gave the heroine of ELLA ENCHANTED the trait of having to obey every order. This fresh angle brought with it inherent conflict and gut emotional appeal.

Not every great book will have an interesting nugget. I took a few identifiers out of the following summary: A ten-year-old girl describes all the good things that happen to her in a new town because of her dog. This sounds like pretty standard fare, but Kate DiCamillo’s BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE was a Newbery Honor Book. So great writing can attract attention for a project some people would dismiss as a dog story. The reverse isn’t quite true. Donald Maass wrote the following: “I’ve received many a dynamite query letter only to be disappointed by the tinny cap-gun pop of a weak manuscript.” You can catch an editor’s attention with a great nugget, but you can only keep it with solid writing and great characters.

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