If you start looking for what I want in a book, every listing should hopefully the same thing: high-concept. Whatever the project, I want it to be high-concept. Middle-grade fiction? High-concept. YA? High-concept. Narrative non-fiction? I even want that high-concept. (Trust me, it works.) But what does that mean? The question came up at the Rutgers conference last weekend. And looking at a lot of the queries I get, most are not high-concept pitches, in spite of what I ask for all over the intarweb. So, it's becoming clearer that this might not be so...well...clear. Most people probably think it's like Justice Potter Stewart's famous line about not being able to define pornography, but that, "I know it when I see it." Luckily, high-concept has a definition: it's a term used to refer to something you can sum up and pitch in a sentence.  It's a very Hollywood term, and it's easier to find examples in movies. Like Star Wars ("epic good v. evil battle...in outer-space"), Jaws ("man-eating shark terrorizes coast"), and even The 40-Year-Old Virgin (self-explanatory). I like high-concept projects because they are easy for me to pick out, and easy for me to pitch. I can visualize it, an editor can visualize, the sales team can visualize it, and most importantly the buyer can visualize it. You can see right away that it's something new, or at the very least a fresh spin on an old story. So, high-concept is often closely linked to commercial hook. Because it's something so concise to pitch, it's easy to see how a wide audience might take to it. But the pitch has to work and make sense. For example, if you sent me a query for your novel and said, "it's Lord of the Rings meets the Care Bears," I'd have no idea what that would look like, or why anyone would want to see that. But if you said "it's set in the future, where everyone gets mandatory plastic surgery at age 16 to become beautiful", well, I'd say that's awesome, and continue to feel sad that someone else found that first. The other trick is making sure the writing lives up to the concept. I've read projects where the pitch was killer, but the writing didn't match up--and I was left disappointed. While it's true that a little extra allowance is given to high-concept projects in terms of the level of writing, at the end of the day the words on the page have to do the story justice. They don't have to be the most eloquent, literary, exquisitely crafted gems (hell, think about the dialogue in the Star Wars movies), but you have to tell your story compellingly.  So, did that answer the question? If not, leave your thoughts below. And then send me your high-concept pitches.