What Agents and Editors Crave: A Core Concept That's Unique, Universal, & Urgent

UUU is the Secret Sauce of Creative Success

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

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Every successful book must be about something that emanates UUU, and that secret sauce must be evident in the first pages of any manuscript you submit for representation or publication.

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Hello Loreates,

I want to give a special shout out to

Homi Hormasji

and

Marina

, the first Loreates to entrust me with their work for “Take-5” Packet Letters. For those who missed my announcement last week, I’m now offering Premium subscribers an editorial letter of feedback plus margin notes on 5 pages (ideally, the first or most important 5) of creative work or queries. More HERE.

This process refreshes my MFA advising gears and helps me identify the tips that I need to amplify here in MFA Lore. Tips like the principle of UUU, which I truly do believe is the secret sauce that agents and editors are seeking every time they open a new submission. So I thought I’d offer a post about that formula today.

Also, since I expect that most of the “Take 5” work I review will be first pages, I’m going to focus on model first pages that exemplify UUU. And since this is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, I’m going to seek these models in books by and about Asian Americans.

As always, thank you for reading AND writing!

Aimee

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The Secret Sauce of Creative Success

Over my many decades as an author, teacher, and ghostwriter, I’ve had the privilege of working with over a dozen editors at presses small and large. I’ve worked on projects that sold at auction. And I’ve sometimes struggled to understand what gave certain books lift-off while other laudable manuscripts languished for lack of enthusiastic representation. It took me a long time and many of my own setbacks, but I finally figured out the general formula for a winning book concept. It boils down to Unique + Universal + Urgent, or UUU.

What makes this combination sublime?

1. Uniqueness attracts the reader’s attention.

2. Universality connects the reader to the story or message.

3. Urgency generates the need to know that keeps the reader turning pages.

4. By subtly layering these three ingredients throughout the work but especially in the opening pages, you will hook your readers and hold them spellbound.

Note that I say general and concept. I’m not here to tell anyone specifically what to write about or how to write it. And I’m not suggesting that this secret sauce is a substitute for the literary integrity and polish of the underlying prose. But I’ve seen far too much rejection of extraordinarily beautiful writing to believe that the quality of prose alone can sell a book. Every successful book of fiction or nonfiction must be about something that emanates UUU, and this secret sauce must be evident in the first pages of any manuscript or proposal you submit to agents or editors.

• One caveat: Whether or not you concern yourself with this formula right now depends on what you’re writing and on your stage in the writing process. If you’re still in the early phases of work on a fiction or creative nonfiction project, I urge you to keep messing around without worrying about “selling” the work until you’ve found the Abiding Question that fires you up, that keeps you enthralled, and that gives the work meaning for you. Once you’ve found your own burning core of story, then you can revise to make sure it also conveys Uniquely Universal Urgency to others. If, however, you’re pitching a mainstream nonfiction book, you’ll need to make sure from the very start that this secret sauce is prominent in your core concept and proposal— along with the essential 3Ms: Message, Messenger, and Moment.

Let’s take the ingredients of this recipe one by one.

What’s Unique?

By Unique, I mean some aspect of the work’s essence that is truly novel and intriguingly singular. It could be the voice or the poetic music of the prose. It could be a hot topic that’s about to explode in the zeitgeist, or a new angle on a topic that’s already taken off. It could be a wild and irresistible character, or an exciting place or historical event that few readers have ever heard of.

In my own work, I’ve always searched for the unique element that will make the book stand out:

• When I wrote my first memoir, Solitaire, no one else had ever written a memoir of anorexia, so mine was the first.

• When I wrote my novels Face and Cloud Mountain, hardly any fiction had been published about mixed race Chinese-American identity or interracial marriages like my grandparents’.

• When I wrote my second memoir, Gaining, no one else had yet written a mainstream book about the scientific underpinnings of eating disorders or about the post-recovery afterlife of eating disorders.

• When I wrote Glorious Boy, I thought for sure I’d be the first to set a WWII novel in the fascinating but remote historical setting of the Andaman Islands. [The fact that I was wrong, and a competing book was being shopped in NY at the same time as mine, wound up canceling us both out among the Big 5 publishers.]