The Dungeon Crawler Carl Effect

The book world shifted a few years ago when a new series made waves on the internet, making a lot of people question the sanity of their favorite booktokers when they recommended a LitRPG. The talking heads and reviewers that will gladly talk about another book from the usual authors began talking about this indie author and his wild story that seemed really off the wall. I still have no idea which mainstream Booktuber or Booktoker found it first, but I watched this series crash over the recommendations like a wave.

I finally caved to the pressure and decided to give the series a try. Just like most people who’ve read at least the first book in this series, I quickly understood. This series was one of my favorites that I’d read in a long time.

The effect that this series has had on the book world is the dream of any indie author who puts their stories forward to the public. We all want to be discovered and to have our stories go viral in a good way. The level of discovery that Matt Dinniman achieved with this series is every author’s dream.

Having met Matt on a few occasions, I can say that this couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. So this isn’t an article that’s meant to complain that it was him, because he very much deserved it. Instead I want to talk about the little things that Matt did to position himself in a way that other authors can replicate.

So what are some of these steps that Matt has used to take the step into the spotlight. First is what set the stage for the rest of the success, that was building a community. After that, he found good partners to help make a quality product.

In the LitRPG genre, building a community is a pretty straightforward process. There are a few channels where you can share your stories and bring attention to them. Often these are serialized sites like Royal Road where people can act like beta readers and share notes and opinions on your stories while finding new authors that they might not find through the traditional paths.

After this, readers and fans are filtered over to Patreon or another similar location. This is a great place to bring committed fans together and gain a little extra money at the same time. Patreon is where Matt really shined.

Matt takes the basic Patreon structure to a whole other level by involving his community in almost every step of the writing process. He brings in polls about everything from loot boxes to potential monsters and plot points. All of this is worked into the story along with reader notes and suggestions.

But he doesn’t just add these things in as an afterthought. Some of these lootbox items have become major plot points and some of the monsters and side characters are now major parts of the story. This level of involvement and inclusion has built a massive buy-in and devotion to his stories.

To compound this success further, Matt has done a good job finding partners to create the best product possible. The biggest example of this is the audiobook narrator for this series Jeff Hayes from Soundbooth Theater. Many of the people who’ve found this series and enjoyed it were only drawn by the extremely high quality audiobook.

This is one of the few series I know of that people actively encourage readers to do the audiobook instead. I’m a massive fan of what Jeff has done with this series and I look forward to any book he narrates. This partner has built another big increase of their audience and was a major factor that led to their shared success.

So with all of this, the formula is simple, but the execution is much more complicated. Authors have simple blueprints to move forward with, but the efforts to find the right partners and building a community are much more complicated. Can you find a path to this and what will be the end result? That’s going to be the magic question as you pursue the dream we all share. Good luck and don’t forget to strive for that “New Achievement”.