(2017-04-23) How We Got10 Million Teens To Read Fiction On Their Phones

How We Got 10 Million Teens to Read Fiction on Their Phones

For example, the recent YA trend of writing in the first-person present tense is irrelevant

And, we learned that readers are more engaged with a story if they understand the context.

According to our tests, teen readers are equally interested in reading a story when it has a white protagonist as when it has a brown one. Moreover, teenage boys are equally interested in stories with female protagonists as with male protagonists. But, perhaps most interesting of all, teen girls prefer stories with female protagonists.

But there seemed to be a ceiling in the completion rate. Of all the stories we tested, in the very best cases only about a third of readers would make it all the way to the end. That’s on a five-minute read.

we took it as a challenge. We asked ourselves: can we come up with a format innovation that makes reading fiction more engaging for teenagers?

Then we had an off-the-wall idea to test a story written as a text message conversation between the characters

As the category has grown, several copycats of Hooked have emerged

We also started to see a massive opportunity in the business of storytelling. And this question about my unusual protagonist kept nagging at me. Was the world ready for a protagonist like me?

Something felt wrong about how we were approaching the book. As app developers accustomed to a Lean Startup mindset, it felt strange to spend so long behind closed doors creating this huge project, without having any sense of whether it would resonate.

We decided to a/b test it.

We started by building a testing system for stories. We took excerpts from fifty best-selling novels in the young adult space. We took the first 1,000 words of each of these novels, or about a five-minute read, and put them up on a basic mobile-optimized web reader we had built for testing. And we developed custom analytics to measure reader behavior.

The metric we were most interested in was completion rate.

The first chat story we tested had staggering results. Almost every teenager who started reading our chat story finished it in one session

(cf CardDeck)