Text Message Thrillers

(Originally aired Sep 14, 2016) Guest: Prerna Gupta, Founder and CEO of Hooked "Dracula," "The Screwtape Letters," "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" – all are examples of fiction that plays out through the exchange of letters and documents. In the digital era, authors have taken to telling stories through chains of emails between characters. No surprise that text messages are the next frontier. That’s what a startup called Hooked has tapped into. They call themselves “fiction for the Snapchat generation.” You download the app, pick a story to read and up comes the first few lines – written as a text, of course. Click “next” and another text pops up to advance the plot. It’s working so well, the founders of Hooked think they could use the data from their app to find the next “Harry Potter.”