It takes a lot of work to be an overnight success, and nobody knows that more than Matt Dinniman, author of the massively popular “Dungeon Crawler Carl” series of books that’s sold a whopping 13.5 million copies.
“I’ve been writing since I was a kid. My first book came out way back in 2003. It was published with a small press. Back then, you didn’t self-publish because if you did, it meant you weren’t good enough. That stigma still exists,” Dinniman tells Page Six Hollywood during a brief respite from his packed schedule at San Diego Comic-Con.
He finally caught the self-publishing bug in 2017, releasing “Dominion of Blades” in the lesser-known (at the time, at least) Literary Role-Playing Game (LitRPG) genre. In the years that followed, he made a living selling drawings of cats and dogs at conventions (he attended 42 of them in 2019 alone). When those cons took a hiatus in 2020 due to the pandemic, he decided to get serious about his next project: “Dungeon Crawler Carl.”
The series follows pants-less Coast Guard vet Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, as they embark on an epic adventure within an intergalactic reality show.
He was thrilled when his Patreon started making “50 bucks a month,” but his journey really took off when the audiobook was released and skyrocketed in popularity.
By 2023, he had sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the series when Penguin Random House came calling.
“When they published it in August of 2024, it was selling in every store in the country. TikTok discovered it, and it’s been exponential for years,” Dinniman says.
Now, even more fans are poised to embark on his dungeon-crawling odyssey as a TV series adaptation is currently in development at Peacock.
Dinniman will serve as an executive producer on the series, alongside Seth MacFarlane under his Fuzzy Door banner and “Thor: Ragnarok” scribe Christopher Yost, who will also write the show. (Jeff Hays, the narrator and producer of the audiobooks, was cast as the voice of Prince Donut in the series yesterday.)
Dinniman received several offers to adapt his work, but went with NBCUniversal.
So what is it about “Dungeon Crawler Carl” that’s captured the hearts of so many? It’s quite simple, Dinniman says. “I mean, it’s got a cat in it.”
