For years at publishing conferences, when industry prognosticators wanted to point to the potential for consumption of literature in digital form, they’d talk about the popularity of cell phone novels in Asia. (Here’s one of the New York Times trend articles about it from 2008.)
These days, it’s more popular to talk about the potential for serialized fiction (see our recent coverage of Radish), and now we’re starting to see increased attention to chat-based storytelling. Chat-style stories unfold as a series of instant messages and use that visual style; you feel like you’re reading someone else’s conversation on your mobile device.
The latest chat storytelling app is Tap from Wattpad [Editor’s note: Tap is now defunct]; Tap’s launch is a particularly interesting move, given the nearly 50 million monthly audience members in the Wattpad community. Wattpad has established reach to readers, a mobile-driven readership, and a platform full of ready, professional writers to help generate new stories. The two existing competitors:
- Amazon (of course) rolled out Rapids [Editor’s note: now defunct] for kids between the ages of seven and 12 in late 2016, for $2.99/month.
- Hooked, an app by the startup Telepathic, launched in fall 2015. It’s free to download, but readers have to pay for unlimited access to all stories—either $2.99/week or $39.99/year. It’s targeted at teens and allows readers to create their own stories.
Quite naturally, efforts have so far focused on younger readers, and Wattpad’s demographic is known to skew younger as well. Tap’s pricing is identical to that of Hooked, and while Tap readers can’t currently create their own stories, that functionality is coming soon.
Bottom line: Outside of the publishing industry, you can find continued interest in and experimentation with chat-based user interfaces. Actually, even within the publishing industry, it’s not that uncommon. (Atria’s Crave uses chat in its story lines.) Chat-based literature is of interest to the larger entertainment industry, and Hooked as well as Wattpad work with Hollywood producers to identify writing talent and promising intellectual property. In fact, Hooked’s investors include prominent figures from Warner Brothers and Bollywood, and its parent company has raised more than $3 million so far. Keep an eye on this trend, especially since it provides a path for companies like Wattpad to monetize the writing and writers on their platform.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
