How to get 10 million young people reading. The story behind Hooked.

Something is changing considerably in the world of literature. Libraries are closing or turning into flex spaces for poor freelancers. The sold circulation of an average successful novel remains in four figures. Young people no longer watch TV or listen to the radio, but make their own well-watched and generously paid films on YouTube. Or they spend all day on Snapchat. And there they are fairly unreachable to people who want to make money from them, or bring them useful information. But wait.

I seriously don't know how big it is already in the Netherlands, but reading stories using chat technology is booming worldwide. The two biggest are Hooked and Tap, each with millions of downloads in the android and apple app stores. Today I read on Medium.com the fascinating story of two app developers who set out to write a book and ended up with an app that got millions of young people reading. What they discovered along the way is quite revealing, and hopeful.

Addictive

First of all, a brief explanation: chat-reading basically means that you are presented with a story in the form of a chat. So you immediately have the feeling that you are secretly reading something that is happening live at that very moment. You are served that up sentence by sentence, one dialogue clause at a time. Keep clicking on your screen and you get the next sentence.

It works. I found myself with rosy ears straight into the first story, until the inevitable revenue model presented itself. If I wanted to know if that creepy bloody woman outside would manage to smash the windows, I had to pay or wait 30 minutes. Clever.

In that respect, a chatreader like every online game in the world: for free, you get a nice basic experience, but if you pay, that experience gets better (if all goes well).

Cliché format

Someone sits in a house and is threatened, and apps with someone else who wants to help, but cannot, because stuck in a taxi, on a boat, on a plane, or kidnapped by a zombie themselves.

After some scrolling through the comments and reviews, I found that many, if not all, of the stories have a similar format: someone is in a house and is being threatened, and apps with someone else who wants to help, but can't, because stuck in a taxi, on a boat, on a plane, or abducted by a zombie himself. It does not yet provide much enrichment of the imagination, but that is a matter of time. After all, when letter writing became technically possible (better pens, cheaper paper, a serious mail business) it also took a while for Les Liaisons Dangereuses to be written, while the form of the epistolary novel was already immensely popular had become.

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What surprised the app's creators most in developing the app is that gender and race issues, which tend to crop up in 'real' books and films, are hardly present in the chat novel. By that I mean the skin colour or gender of the protagonists. That should be a boost for us, the people who care about cultural appropriaton Or discrimination in general.

Dutch examples

Taptap and Hooked have not yet appeared in a Dutch version. Perhaps because Dutch is a small language. It could also be because the threshold of paying for online content is a bit less established here.

So herewith a challenge to publishers, but especially to writers of Young Adult literature: plunge into the chats. And make sure there are new story formats there too, which will also keep readers hooked once they have grown beyond the 'help there's a scary beast under my bed' genre. Indeed, I think there is a great market for that.

Are there already examples of Dutch chat novels? Share them with me, via the comments.