With more and more teenagers giving up books for Facebook and Twitter, an Indian American businesswoman-cum-author has recently launched an app that features short fiction for young readers or what she calls the “Snapchat generation”.
Each book on the app called Hooked will be roughly 1,000 words and is designed to be read in about five minutes.
Prerna Gupta, who envisions the app as being like “Twitter for fiction,” turned to some of the top MFA programs to recruit alumni writers.
“We listed that we had paid creative writing opportunities and the response was overwhelming,” Gupta said.
While she wouldn’t disclose actual figures, Gupta said pay varied by story but was very “competitive.”
Initially, the app will only feature content from screened contributors. However, eventually users will be able to submit content of their own.
The app is free to download and features one free story a day. Readers can unlock more stories with the subscription service. A week of unlimited stories costs $2.99. A month is $7.99 and a year is $39.99.
There are currently over 200 stories and Gupta said they add more every day.
Telepathic, the company Gupta founded with her husband, Parag Chordia, has raised $1.9 million and closed its first round of funding.
Ms Gupta was co-founder and CEO of Khush, the leading developer of intelligent music apps like Songify, an app that turns speech into music. Gupta and Chordia, who met at Stanford in 2004, founded Khu.sh, a startup that built music apps. The duo sold Khu.sh to competitor Smule in 2011 for several million dollars and decided to write a science fiction fantasy trilogy.