My guest on the show today is Matt Dinniman, author of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is seven books into a projected 10 volume run.

I happened upon the book when I was trawling Kindle unlimited for science fiction to read. It kept recommending it to me, and I kept resisting, because it was hard to take seriously a novel called Dungeon Crawler Carl. Finally I gave it a try, and literally within about three weeks I’d burned through all seven novels in the series, each of which runs around 600 pages or more.

They are a blast: hilarious, absurd, propulsively plotted, just an immense amount of fun.

Matt and I talk about the series, which was initially self-published but has now been re-issued by a big commercial publisher and is being adapted for television by Seth MacFarlane. We talk about his career prior to the recent success, when he mostly made his money by painting cats and dogs. We talk about changes in the publishing industry, and more. I enjoyed talking to Matt, who is precisely the kind of person you want enjoying this kind of unexpected mid life success.

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