New App Hooking Millions With Short Stories

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Nineteen-year-old Mikey Sean McGuigan says the first time he heard about the app Hooked he was sold.

"The name...really wraps it all up," he said. "It hooks you into the story."

The app allows users to read fast-paced, short stories right on their smart phones and in the form of text messages between two people.

"Because you're actually going through these texts and it's almost as if you were texting and he's running away from a killer or something," McGuigan explained.

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Since its release three years ago, the rise in popularity of the chat fiction apps like Hooked has led to more  authors to take a leap into the new format.

"The biggest challenge was coming up with a story that kind of fit the parameters of this style of writing." Kayla Parent, a Hooked writer said.

Millions of users have read her first Hooked story, a thriller that took Kayla a fraction of the time to write compared to her novels.

Hooked has topped Apple's app store three times and more than 20 million people have downloaded the free app.

Users also have the option to subscribe for a fee and unlimited reading.

"It almost feels as if you're actually going through what the characters are going through," McGuigan said.