DUNGEON CRAWLER CARL, why TWILIGHT is good actually, and the importance of reading bestsellers

Every book is a learning opportunity...

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I just finished reading the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book, which is very very popular, and I know that because they sell it at the Target around the corner from me. Everything I knew about it going in indicated it should not be successful—these books do a lot of things authors are told not to do.

• It’s a genre called LitRPG, which mixes sci-fi and fantasy with video game rules. That’s really niche; I’m a threat-level nerd and I have very little experience with tabletop and RPG games. So it’s a high bar of entry for a mainstream audience. Strike one.

• While fantasy readers are often tolerant of high page counts, most readers prefer books on the shorter side. But these books are doorstoppers. There are eight of them, with something like 4,500 cumulative page, and people are devouring them. Strike two.

• Writers are often encouraged to find a middle ground when writing a series—books can tell an ongoing story but each book should feel like a standalone, so if someone picks up the third or fourth book in a series, they can enjoy it without feeling alienated. I’m halfway through the second book, and it would not work as a standalone. Strike three.

• Spinning off that third strike, cliffhangers are often frowned upon. Me and Jeff Rake caught a decent amount of flak from readers for writing a cliffhanger ending for Detour. The ending of the first DCC book is so abrupt I thought there were pages missing. Strike four.

Four strikes.

Yet, the books broke containment; they’ve sold 14 million copies, and they’re serving as source material for graphic novels and games. Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane is developing a TV show for Peacock. Matt Dinniman’s series is now a full-blown business.

The ascension so surprised me, I went back and tired to figure out how we got here.

The books were originally self-published, and then picked up by Ace Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House—but only for print. Dinniman retained ebook and audio, which, good for him! The dude could probably buy a small country at this point.

The series seemed to catch fire on TikTok, and the first entry was named as the inaugural Book of the Year by the Books-A-Million chain. The audiobooks have done incredible business, and we all know audio is the new frontier of the publishing industry.

There are other factors, for sure, but these seem to be some of the major ones. Having read the first book now… I do get it. There are elements to the book that play very well:

• While the RPG rules are dense, the constant stream of achievements and loot boxes are like little dopamine hits… you constantly want to see what kind of gear Carl and Princess Donut are getting, and how those things might be utilized.

• Speaking of… there is a cat, and the cat’s name is Princess Donut, and the cat is very snarky, and this feels very much geared toward the Internet Generation (the power of cats is undeniable, considering people constantly tell me how much they love the cat in Assassins Anonymous… though mine does not speak).

• The books are never, ever boring. They’re fun. There’s a lot of world-building but it moves at a strong clip, and it does an amazing job of planting seeds and asking questions, which serve to draw you through the narrative, as you hope to find out what happens next.

• Carl is a solid protagonist… he’s big and strong and smart and a touch edgy but, ultimately, kind. But also blank enough that a reader can project themselves onto him. It’s funny that, given the circumstances of the book, he’s stuck wearing a pair of boxers and doesn’t have shoes (big-time Die Hard vibes, but if it works it works—it’s an endearing vulnerability and a solid running joke).

• They’re addictive. As soon as I finished the first book, I wanted to dive into the second. So many great dangling threads, and as a reader, I’m excited to find out what happens. And the writer in me is curious about how Dinniman is going to keep this story going in a way that doesn’t feel repetitive.

I’ve seen some criticisms of the series—that the jokes are a little cheesy (some of them, yeah, but for me that adds to the endearment) and that the writing is a bit clunky. Some folks say they’re misogynistic or conservative, but I would chalk that up to poor media literacy.

The quality of writing tends to be the most common criticism lobbed at popular books. People said it about JK Rowling and EL James and Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown and James Patterson. Anyone who goes on to sell millions of copies will eventually be accused of being a shitty writer.

I’m going to be a little bold and say that none of these people are bad writers.

(JK Rowling is a bad person, but that’s a different conversation…)

Personally, I don’t like to think in terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ There are books that are for me, and books that are not for me. I read Twilight. It was not for me. But the series has sold more than 160 million copies worldwide and was translated into more than 40 languages. That’s way more than I’ve sold.

Which means Meyer knows something about the world that I do not. And it would be silly to not at least read them and try to understand them.

For what it’s worth, the Twilight books feature a young woman who is a clumsy introvert—an easy avatar for the reader to imprint themselves upon. She’s desired by two very handsome and powerful men. Plus they’re monsters. Go look up ‘monster smut’ and see how weirdly popular that is.

Forbidden love, eternal commitment, a love triangle, et cetera, et cetera.

But beyond that, the writing style is both addictive, and effortless.

Notice my use of the word effortless.

Back in another life, I was a journalist. When I was in J-school, we were always told that we should write to a fourth-grade level. It’s not about dumbing things down. Our craft was a service—keeping the public informed—and therefore the writing had to be accessible.

I think there’s some wisdom in that. Sure, you can put a little more mustard on your prose when writing a novel, but accessibility draws in mainstream readers. There’s a reason books like Moby Dick aren’t passed around like Dungeon Crawler Carl or Twilight.

Yes, the prose is lovely. It’s widely considered a masterpiece. The book is also dense and boring.

If you put Moby Dick and Twilight side-by-side, from a purely technical perspective, Moby Dick is a better-written book. And yes, Moby Dick has sold a lot of copies… but during Herman Melville’s lifetime it only sold a few thousand.

No one will ever call Twilight a masterpiece of English literature. But it connected with readers. Isn’t that what all of us are trying to achieve? To connect with other people. By that metric, you could call Stephenie Meyer a good writer.

Or at very least, an excellent storyteller.

Meyer set out to accomplish a goal—the same one we all do—to connect with as many readers as we can, while making a living doing it. And she achieved it. Good on her.

Anyway, this is why I think it’s important to read widely, and read bestsellers.

Reading outside your genre is important because, while a sphere of influence is good, that sphere can become a bubble and you can suffocate inside it. So if you’re a crime writer, you should read fantasy and romance, and if you’re a romance writer, you ought to pick up some weird sci-fi. Everyone should be reading poetry.

And as for reading bestsellers—it’s good to see what works. This isn’t about emulation. I don’t want to write like James Patterson (even though I did co-write a novella with him, and not only did I make some good money, but I learned a lot from his notes).

Such as…

• The power of short chapters with strong kickers (they give readers a sense of accomplishment and encourage them to keep reading).

• Establishing authority for your characters (we tend to like knowledgable and capable characters, and while this is something I learned from minimalism too, characters like Robert Langdon are popular because they’re real damn smart).

• Focus on analogies and metaphors readers can grasp and understand. I described someone getting hit as feeling like he’d been “smashed in the gut by a cannonball.” Patterson helpfully pointed out that no one alive knows what that feels like.

• Momentum rules. Always be moving the story forward.

Elmore Leonard talked about this stuff, too. His golden rule for writing was: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” He also encouraged avoiding lengthy descriptions and leaving our parts readers tend to skip—he was all about momentum.

And he was a pretty damn good writer.

All of this is to say: Definitely read the stuff you want to read, but mix a bestseller in there every now and again. And instead of snickering at it, consider what about it works, that you might be able to apply to your own writing process.

I’m proud to say that my writing voice and process is wholly unique to me—but I’ve learned a lot just from reading. And my reading habits stretch from the New York Times bestseller list, to micro presses and self-published works, covering every conceivable genre.

(While I’m locked into the Dungeon Crawler Carl books for right now, I do plan on picking up Heated Rivalry soon…)

I get the impulse to shit on other writers. It’s a coping mechanism. Especially when something you’ve given your heart and blood to gets jammed up in the publishing process, or worse, it makes it through the crucible and then flatlines when it reaches bookstores.

It’s easy to point a finger and say: “Well I’m better than that.”

You’d be better served by following the words of Ted Lasso, who said he was quoting Walt Whitman but there’s no evidence Walt Whitman actually said it: “Be curious, not judgmental.”