PALO ALTO, Calif. (DIYA TV) — When Prerna Gupta’s new app, named “Hooked,” was released, she described it as “books for the Snapchat generation.” The app features short fiction novels for young-adult readers, each about 1,000 words, and designed to be read in approximately five minutes. The stories are told entirely through dialogue, and read like text messages.
“Epistolary literature is nothing new,” Gupta told CNN shortly before the apps release. “Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ is one of my favorite books and the story is told entirely through letters.”
Hooked allows you to read one story per day for free, but requires users to have a paid-subscription to advance further. Prices to subscribe vary, ranging from $3 per week to $40 per year. Stories on Hooke are commissioned by its parent company, Telepathic, of which Gupta also serves as CEO. Gupta and Telepathic’s long-term plans for Hooked include evolving it into a writing based platform, similar to that of Wattpad or Medium, but with a specific focus on much shorter works.
“We feel like we’ve got what we need to make things successful. Our belief is that there’s a big opportunity to build something like YouTube that builds on narrative,” Gupta told Business Insider.
Gupta has compared the success of Hooked to the blockbuster film ‘The Martian,’ which initially began as a blog before it became a book, and eventually a movie
Silicon Valley investors agree with Gupta’s sentiment of success, and now want their piece of the pie.
Hooked has already raised $2.9 million in capital, and is valued at about $15 million. Not a shocking piece of information, Gupta is an angel investor herself in several companies, and is a resident mentor at 500 startups.
Her personal plans for the app are focused on keeping its users strictly reading and writing fiction. “One of the things we hope Hooked will do is encourage more people to write fiction and to understand that we all have the ability to express ourselves in this way,” she said. “Obviously writing a 100,000-word novel is daunting for most people. But writing a 1,000-word text-message story—maybe that’s something that’s more accessible to a broader set of people.”
