Matthew Kent Powers Up the LitRPG Revolution

What happens when a LitRPG writer walks into the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory and casually reveals that one of the fastest-growing corners of modern fantasy has also built the best ecosystem in publishing? You get this fascinating conversation with author Matthew Kent, who joins Mookie to explain why game-inspired fiction is no niche gimmick, instead a thriving movement with obsessed readers, hyper-engaged communities, massive books, booming audiobooks, and writers who help each other succeed.

Matthew breaks down "Literary Role Playing Game" genre from the ground floor: stories where characters level up, stats matter, systems speak, and narrative itself gets interrupted by prompts, rankings, alerts, and evolving character sheets. If that sounds strange, it is, but the genre is also wildly popular. Mookie presses him on what makes LitRPG work, how it differs from conventional fantasy, and why so many readers become addicted to this hybrid of storytelling, gaming logic, and progression psychology.

The conversation goes far beyond mechanics. Matthew explains the rise of Royal Road, the online platform where writers serialize chapters, gain armies of beta readers, refine their stories in public, and build audiences before publication. They discuss how community-driven feedback, Kindle Unlimited, audiobook culture, Reddit fandoms, and social media have created a self-sustaining machine that many traditional authors would give up their agents for. 

They also tackle the pressures of modern publishing: AI-generated book spam, Amazon review bottlenecks, the economics of indie writing, and why authors need readers more than ever. Matthew offers blunt, practical insight on craft, marketing, consistency, and what separates books that connect from books that disappear.

Along the way, Mookie recognizes something bigger: LitRPG may look eccentric from the outside, but under the hood it has solved problems the rest of publishing still complains about. So if you are a writer searching for audience, a reader curious about new frontiers in fantasy, or someone wondering where fiction is heading in the age of games, platforms, and AI, give them a listen! 

The Guest

I write my stories with one goal in mind: to help others dream. I want my readers to find worlds they can escape into, characters they can relate to, and adventures that ignite their imagination. Currently, I live in the southeastern United States, sharing a busy but fulfilling life with my wife, our son, and twin daughters. Our home is also filled with the energy of two dogs, making it all the more lively. Yet, with so many stories swirling in my head, I often find that there’s never quite enough time to put them all on paper. And as for the twins, they remind me of an old joke: “How are twins and the Spanish Inquisition alike? No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

Get His Novels & Check Out His Royal Road

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Matthew-Kent/author/B01N26PQ3H 

https://www.royalroad.com/profile/79682/fictions

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello and welcome to the science fiction and fantasy factory. I'm your host, Wookie Spitz, and I'm excited to have Matthew Kent in the factory with us today. Welcome, Matthew. Well, thank you. I'm looking forward to this. Yeah, I've been looking forward to it also. You are my first lit RPG guest, and it's a vibrant sub-genre, and we could dive into it and talk all about it. But it stands for literary role-playing game. You use game mechanics, you can go into it and in a sense emulate the experience of playing a role-playing game from the vantage point of storytelling through that lens, using some of that formatting, uh, you know, setting up attributes, creating worlds. And I find that very compelling and interesting, and it's way more vibrant a genre than I had even thought it was. So hats off to you for rocking it. Thank you. Tell us how you got into it and your approach to it.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Well, I started reading LitRPG probably about 2014, and my first novel came out in 2017. And most people don't realize, but the idea of the genre actually dates back to the 1980s. Uh, there was a series of novels where the person was writing, and it would be considered either portal fiction or isikai, where a group of people were taken into a world where it was a fantasy world and they could level up, but they didn't have it didn't show the mechanics like Lin RPG did. Uh D. Russ is one of the big authors over there. Um Vasily Mahenko and a couple of others, some very good work, but it really started kicking off here about 2012, 2014. One of the first books I read was called NPCs. And the story is actually hilarious when you look at it. These NPCs are in the tavern one night when a group of players come through, and the players are all typical, they don't know anything, they've eaten poisoned mushrooms, they're in the tavern and they die. The NPCs ransack their pockets and find out that these players have a summons from the king who is known to get very upset when people don't show up, and they're afraid that he's gonna come in and kill everybody else in the town. So they decide that they're going to impersonate the players, and hijinks ensue. Nobody winds up being what they think that they're going to be. Um, they have a crippled gnome who becomes a paladin, they have the orc bartender who becomes a wizard, they have the mayor's daughter who becomes a barbarian, and the town guard who becomes a thief. And it is just absolutely hilarious, and that's kind of where I got started. And then I started listening to the books and reading the books, and finally, my first book I wrote, um The Apprentice of Arabella, and it went pretty well. I I it was way too short, it was about 55,000 words, but I was happy with telling the story, and it became a series. Um, the second book is the uh prisoner of Arabella, and finally the war for Arabella, which I just recently completed. I'd almost gotten it done, and then my hard drive died with my only copy of it on there, and you know how it is when your hard drive dies and you have a project.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Yeah, Matthew, it's 2026, buddy. You gotta load that shit up to the cloud.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

Well, I'm doing that now. Uh I actually now have about three different computers that I work on. I keep working copies everywhere. I've got copies on uh saves and thumb drives, and boy, whoever knew that thumb drives were gonna get so cheap. Yeah, you could get a terabyte for 20 bucks.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Less than that, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:47

Oh it's crazy. We've got a place down here you can go and buy three 20 gigabyte or yeah, gigabyte uh drives for about $15. And like you, you've probably seen the computers from their inception. I remember our first one, uh TRS80 Model 3, and good god, a hard drive for that was $10,000 back in the day.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

I remember paying, I think, $600 for an Apple IIe hard drive extender, and I think it was a whopping 20 megabytes. Yeah, I paid six hundred dollars for 20 megabytes, and I thought I was the man.

SPEAKER_01 5:35

It's just crazy, and then you think about it. I mean, my kids are young, I I've got uh twin seven-year-olds and a nine-year-old. They don't understand. My cell phone has more computing power than the computers that sent the Apollo programs up.

SPEAKER_00 5:54

Oh, by exponential magnitudes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

But my latest book, of course, is um Aether Earth 1953, and it's a retroactive uh system apocalypse, which the system apocalypse is where a system comes to the earth and pretty much destroys all the technology, but it happens in 1953, where we don't have the integrated circuits, and so we didn't have fine and delicate technology that could be damaged by power surges or monosurges or anything like that. Instead, you've got pretty simple things. You've got fuel, you've got air, and you've got a machine that runs off of it, and that's pretty much it. Um so far it's been really fun to write. Uh, people seem to be really enjoying book one. Book two came out, and we've been having a little controversy uh with Amazon and the way that they're doing the ratings now because they're trying to stop what it a lot of people that are uploading AI books. These are books that are just jet written by AI. Somebody throws in a prompt, they've got a book at the end of after about 10 minutes and throw it up there and they move on to the next one. So they're trying to stop that by making it harder to get ratings and reviews up for about the first two weeks. But it's impacting the self-published authors and some of the smaller independent author um publishing houses like Royal Guard Publishing, who I publish through for the Aether Earth series. So we've got a little bit of things we're working through with that, but both of the books are doing fairly well. Um, I am pretty much a no-name author, even though I've been publishing for years under my own uh publishing house. I just don't have quite the level of uh name recognition that, say, Matt Dinnerman does, which he's a fantastic guy. I've talked to him a couple times online. Uh, Dungeon Crawler Carl, of course, is bringing a lot more people into the realm of LitRPG, and it's absolutely hilarious. My brother, I've told him about it for years, and he's like, Oh, I don't know if it's anything I really want to listen to. And then you look to listen to the first book for uh Dungeon Crawler Carl, and now he's hooked. So that's been a really good thing for us. It's bringing in new writers, new readers, new listeners, and it's kind of going more mainstream now. Um, you know, there's a few books that I would say are kind of seminal works. One of my absolute favorites is called The Trap Mind Project by Michael Chatfield. Are you familiar with it?

SPEAKER_00 9:08

No, I'm not. That's why I love having you on. You're turning me on to this genre. I knew I knew Dinnerman and some of the bigger guys, but I'm I'm not familiar with this one.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Okay, so Michael Chatfield is one of the really big writers in LitRPG. But one of his this is probably his first series, and the idea is that aliens have destroyed the earth, but they get the idea that they're going to use humanity to take care of their problems, which they've got monsters and other people that are pressing in on their areas. So they recreate humanity and they make humans think that the game is or that the game is just a game. Instead, the game is actually the reality. Reality is the game. So they make it to where it's boring, real life is boring, and you when you feel pain in the real world, it's much worse than if you're in the game. So they gear people to become gamers. Well, one of the gamers actually winds up being an important person, and he runs a corporation that the world depends on, and so he starts going into the game, and he kinda and the uh real world loses him to the game, and so he becomes a bleeder, which is somebody that um they can't be replaced and they can't really be controlled, and from there he learns the real secret the earth is destroyed, uh he's living it the game is actually real, and then all these people that he thinks are NPCs are are real and uh they've made orcs and dwarves and humans and everything in the fantasy setting because humanity is really good at one thing, and that is uh killing things, and just overall they can respawn and come back where the original creators of this technology they can't, or can't very often because eventually they go insane. So it's a really good series, it's uh I believe 12 books. Um Dave Wilmarth is another very good author, he's got some really good series. Um Blaze Corbin now. Blaze Corbin's luck stat strategy is another really good one uh to get into. He also does Delvers LLC, and uh that one is just a really fun series.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

Well, thanks for turning me on to these. I gotta check them out. Let's talk a little bit about lit RPG as a style. Now, one thing that you're bringing up is uh how you need to introduce into these stories the idea that the protagonist and the characters are in a game-like environment, like some kind of simulation, some kind of situation, because the entire setup is this interface, and the writing highlights some of the gamified elements. So you share attributes of the characters, you share goals, like you would be playing a video game on screen. So one aspect is this how is this world within a gamified environment, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:59

Well, one of the key aspects of LitRPG is that the numbers that you see actually have to have some impact with the story. So when you see somebody leveling up and they get stronger, you have to show how they're getting stronger. Um, some settings they have it to where people get super strong, and then others, it's more okay, you can go from normal human to Captain America level of strength or Spider-Man level of strength. And so it has to be something that the attributes that you're dealing with impact the story. Uh it's just like uh with progression fantasy, which is where somebody is training and progressing and growing stronger in that way. Um, it's really an umbrella. Think of it as an umbrella of game lit. Then you have lit RPG. Uh, from there you have uh Portal Fantasy, you have Izikai, which is the idea of somebody is struck um and sent to another universe. It the often thing is they call it truck cun in Japan or Japanese, and it is a moving truck that hits somebody and keeps driving on, and they're knocked into another universe. Um, I'm actually developing a story based on that called uh cross-world delivery, and it's told from the view of the driver. So he's down on his luck, his brother's disappeared, the mob shows up at his doorstep, and they want their money. So, what's he gonna do? One day he's walking, he's worried about it, he sees a flyer, he pulls it down, they're looking for a driver, no questions asked. Well, they're paying, and you know, he's gotta do it. He needs to get the mob paid off before they start to visit his mom. And next thing you know, there's an accident, and he looks and he can't find anything on the truck, he can't find anything around, but he knows that he hit somebody and he doesn't know what's going on, so it kind of goes on from there. Uh, there's other stories like Tao Wong's. Um his he has a couple different series. He has the little uh literary apocalypse, and uh it's where the world ends. Uh, his is Life in the North, uh, very good series. It is, I think, 12 novels actually, or maybe it's not. I lose track sometimes. There are just so many books to read and to get through. Um, Troy Osgood is another very good writer, very prolific. Uh I can't believe it. He's been writing for seven years. I think he has 52 books out. He averages uh about a book a month, and some people are gonna be going, oh, he's using AI. No, he's that good, he's that dedicated, he loves the stories, and he's able to sit down and focus to that extent that he's literally for the past seven years been putting out about 140 to 170 words a month, uh, 170,000 words a month. So when you get somebody that's really engaged, and that's the other aspect, most of the writers they love the gaming, they love the stories. Um, this is one of the few genres that you're going to have people come in that want to write, and you can tell that they don't really enjoy it because their stories are lackluster and kind of just plain Jane. Um, you know, it it's just absolutely amazing. And I think I saw that we were getting on average about 10 new books uh a week in the genre, so it's really hard to keep up with now.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

That's exciting and interesting. And just for the sake of those who haven't had exposure to it, let alone swimming in it, like you have been for years, and all the great authors that you mentioned, let's talk a little bit about how lit RPG is different from what we would consider conventional prose.

SPEAKER_01 17:46

Okay, well, the way that it would be different is you do get the structure of a system, you get the character sheets. So when you're looking at the character sheets, you can see what the person can do. Okay, so say that he's a scout, so he can hide, he's good at cracking, he has higher dexterity, higher agility. It depends on what exactly the stats that the writer comes up with. Um in Aether Earth, one of the statistics that we have is grit, which is how much a person can go through uh kind of a self-worth thing cowboy thing, uh, which kind of fits because it starts off in Texas, of course. Um if there's a system out there, it's been used. One of the most common ones, of course, is Dungeons and Dragons, because it's something that everybody that's ever gamed is kind of familiar with or played a video game is familiar with strength, dex, con, intelligence, charisma, and wisdom. So that's kind of the default setting. Some people uh have chosen just three things, and it's a much broader, and then of course, there's uh the use of mana, and some people even go into the use of stamina. So if you have higher constitution, you have higher stamina, so you have more staying power and more ability to walk or run um and fight, or if you have more mana, of course, you're able to cast more spells or higher level spells. So everything is kind of relative that way, but then of course, uh the other aspect is the system. How does the system interact with the people? Is it a nice system? Is it a bad system? If you've listened to Dungeon Crawler Carl, the computer is the system, pretty much, and really likes Carl's feet. Um, you know, so you get the weird aspects too. Is it going to be snarky? Is it going to be, you know, helpful? Or is it going to carry a grudge? Because some of them really do seem to carry a grudge towards characters.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

And by system, you're really talking about, in a sense, another narrative voice. So I want to dial back a little bit because there's a lot of people who are unfamiliar with you say lit RPG, they don't even know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 20:37

And I want to frame it within the context of even the syntax being different. Now, when you read a standard prose science fiction fantasy book, you've got paragraphs of varied length, right? And it flows, it's a it's a narrative. When you're reading lit RPG, what Matthew is pointing out, just to the uninitiated, you're reading like you'd read a standard science fiction and fantasy book, but then you're literally given stats of the characters that are provided by the system. I want to define these terms. So you have uh a little narrative, like the character enters a bar or a scene, and then literally the system will interrupt the flow of the narrative, given how it's set up, and it'll list out the attributes of the character. So grid, stamina, all these variables that Matthew is highlighting, and then give them a numerical value like Dungeons and Dragons. And as the story progresses, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm kind of a newbie, these stats will change and evolve based on the character's trajectory through that story. And part of the appeal here, I'm thinking, is that you go from a baseline where you know all the stats. And then because of their challenges and their interactions, the stats start to grow. So you feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment on the part of the protagonist for getting from A to B to C to D in a lit RPG story. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 22:16

Exactly. It's very much that way. Um, based on whatever system the person is using, as you level, you can gain stats, or as you're doing different things, you can gain stats. It would be like um, for instance, one of the books I wrote, it is um The Sorcerers of San Antonio, and the main character is a young girl. She's trying to figure out this whole system thing. And one of the things she finds out is that if she does exercises, she can grow her stats. But it's not, oh, I I did uh 15 push-ups and now I'm one point stronger. It's I did 15 push-ups and I'm 0.0 uh 1% stronger. So you're seeing growth. It's slow, but it's like the real world because you're not going to grow super strong, you know, with just a few presses of the dumbbells or barbells. So it's different thing aspects like that where you're seeing that growth, but it comes into play and it has meaning to the story, and it gives the character a reason for doing some of the things that they're doing, like practicing and learning, and in a way it's showing them growing stronger. Um, another aspect of it is sometimes they will have it to where you can learn spells or buy spells from somewhere, or as you level, you can learn spells and different abilities, and that's gonna vary from system to system and book to book. Um there's some very unique systems out there, uh, but right now the top books that I keep seeing referenced are um let's see, of course, Dungeon Crawler Carl. Then we have He Fights with Monsters, and those are some of the top ones. Uh, another one that I absolutely love, but doesn't get very much love in the book world is The Stork Tower. Um, it's written by a gentleman out of uh Australia, and this phenomenon is taking over really the world because we're getting authors from all over the place. Uh, he who fights with monsters, uh, the author's name is Shirtalun, and he's from Australia, and you see that reflected in the main character, um, how they speak, their tone of voice. Um, but the big thing for Lid RPG is the audiobooks. That's one of the big denominators, right there, of uh people's enjoyment is listening to the audiobooks because then the narrator actually can become a big part of the story. Um, Jeff Hayes is absolutely phenomenal with Dungeon Crawler Carl and a lot of the other books that he's written.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

So that for the audiobook, I'm assuming that you're gonna have multiple voices usually. So the system has a voice, right? So, yeah, the system has a voice. The system has a voice. And once again, for the uninitiated, the system is the background setup who's providing this additional narrative information, the stats, it's providing the additional narrative information, but it's also a framework. There could be other things that interrupt the normal, what I'm considering the normal flow of a narrative with this extra stuff. That's another voice, that's a system, right? And then the and then the regular narrative goes to maybe another voice to differentiate that because I'm trying to highlight the big difference in lit RPG. You take it for granted, you're swimming in it, you're living in it. That's true. This is this is weird, this is weird shit for most science fiction and fantasy readers. So I find it, I find it very interesting and compelling for these reasons. And a big reason is because of these significant differences, not only in narrative flow, but in syntax. When you're reading a lit RPG book, the narrative is literally interrupted with stats, with alerts, with all this extra system information, and I find that very interesting.

SPEAKER_01 26:57

Yeah, it is. And depending on how the person interacts with it, sometimes it can be used to their betterment, and sometimes it'll wind up being to their detriment. Uh, in life in the north, uh, the main character is riding down the road on a motorcycle, and his uh systems helper says, Oh, you would know uh there's people up ahead, you'd know them as orcs. He's like, Oh, okay, orcs, I know orcs. And they wind up shooting him in the uh shoulder, and he has an accident on his motorcycle, and he's like, Ali, you told me they were orcs. I said, No, I told you they were like orcs. He's like, orcs aren't supposed to have guns. It's like, well, that's your fault. So it's uh, you know, it comes down to the character's perception of what's actually going on and how they're interacting and what the system actually is. And generally, the viewer might have a or the reader might have a better idea of what the system actually is because they're reading uh the system messages, but generally the characters in the story don't know exactly what the system is, how it works, how it impacts them, or if there's secret stuff going on behind the scenes, which oftentimes there are.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

That's very, very interesting. So you have a bit of a second-person narration alongside the protagonist, and then the reader can put two and two together. The reader's got more information than the characters do, and that can add to some of the tension and build up some of the drama.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

Yeah, and uh it's just absolutely amazing how it can blend together, and this is one of those genres that it didn't really exist and wasn't really recognized by Amazon or anything until about two or three years ago. Um, now it's a little bit more recognized, it's actually becoming much more popular. Um, I've actually used it in some short stories that I have authored myself. I've sent some to uh like Rackantor Press, if you're familiar with them. Uh, absolutely fantastic guys.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

I'm gonna have Sam Robb on the show next week.

SPEAKER_01 29:35

Oh, he's a great guy, but uh I I've got a couple pieces in with them with uh Moogies of Mars and Moogie Noir. So those have been uh pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Yeah, that's why I'm highlighting some of the differences, Matthew, because this is new. Um, not that many people are familiar with it, and I think the differences are striking and very, very interesting. And it also raises a few it raises a few questions. One question is do you need all that extra stuff? And does it sometimes get in the way of just telling the story? That's one question, and then and then the other question related to that is how does all of this extra system information add to the story in ways that other science fiction and fantasy doesn't. That's actually a very good question.

SPEAKER_01 30:31

Um now for myself, I use it to help try and tell the narrative, uh, showing how the character is changing, why the character is changing. Um, for instance, in Aether Earth, John, the main character, you only see his stats um throughout most of the book, but at the beginning, he's comparing his stats with his friend Deke. And they're joking about it because this is the first day it's happened within the first few minutes. They're not really taking it as serious as they might. Um, the main character is a veteran, he served in Korea, you know, the world's just ended, and he suddenly got these stats that are saying that he's uh uh not very charismatic. And you know, he's like, Yeah, that's kind of something I know, you know. What do you want me to do about it? Um but it's key, it can be key to telling the story, but the problem comes in is keeping track. And most of us we use um we we wind up using Word and that kind of thing to keep track of everything. Um it's a lot of tables. You have to be careful with your math. You can easily make mistakes. I've had people come back on my book and say, hey, look, there's a mistake in your math on page 68, and it shows that he should have actually been higher than what he was in such and such a stat. I mean, readers crack this. I mean, you thought Star Trek was bad. There are readers that absolutely love the work, and they will go through and they will read it with a fine-toothed comb, and they will pick apart your system, they will pick apart your ideas, and that's where a lot of the authors are actually that's one of the reasons that a lot of the authors go to Royal Road. Are you familiar with Royal Road? Not really. Not at all, actually. Okay. Royal Road is a site that a lot of LitRPG authors go to and publish their work for free. And what winds up happening is people start reading through their work, and they will leave messages, they will leave ideas, uh, they will comment, and generally it is kind of a way to get beta readers for your work, a large mass of beta readers. And everybody's like going, oh, well, if you post it there, you can't really sell it because it's already out and about. That's the funny thing. People who read on Royal Road aren't going to be buying your books, they're not your customers so much as they are a helper to the system. So Dungeon Crawler Carl got started there. He who fights with monsters got started there, the traveling in got started there, and that's just insane. There's like 34 million words for the traveling in already. Um, some of the best new authors got get started on there, and they continue to publish their work. Then once they get ready to publish it uh through Amazon, they pull it all down. Because, of course, with uh Amazon, you can't have it in Kindle KU if it's published anywhere else. Um absolutely phenomenal, and a lot of the writers wind up getting book deals through there because the publishing houses that do lit RPG pay attention to the people that are on Rising Stars, the people whose read-throughs are absolutely phenomenal, that the books are doing great. And this is something that you don't see in any other type of publishing. I don't even think you see this in the romance area, which would be the one that would be most akin to literary RPG.

SPEAKER_00 34:49

It's like crowdsourcing content with data readers and sharing and commentary. It's like a cauldron of creativity for writers and content for readers, and it's it's pretty interesting.

SPEAKER_01 35:05

It is the other aspect, too, of Royal Road, like I said, is that a lot of people go on there, it kind of refines the ideas. You can refine your uh blurb, um, work on your uh cover if you're going to self-publish. I've done that before. Um, but it's geared more towards, like I said, the lid RPG, which again, it's a bubble, it contains so many different things. Woo uh Wuxia, which is like a more Chinese cultivation-based idea. Uh, if you have any idea of that, that would be like Will White's Cradle series. Uh, again, that's another fantastic series to listen to. But it's just there's so many aspects of it. The other aspect, too, is that the genre is really based not like a lot of others, where you get the uh readers coming to you because you're advertising, it's because you're in social media and you're there and you're talking to the readers and you're sharing what you're doing, and your readers get to know your work through you. Um Reddit, Facebook, BookTalk, TikTok, all those different things are the real key aspects for the marketing for LitRPG. And again, I keep saying it's also the marketing for the romance books, but again, the two groups kind of share a lot of the same aspects as far as who their readership is. LitRPG readers tend to be very well read in their genre. Um Kindle KU is one of the biggest things that has helped the industry and the readers, or and the writers actually, because there's some readers that will read 10, 15 books a month. And these are not small books. Most of the RPG books start at 100,000 words on up to I think a few of them are 100 uh 350-ish, with the one that has the most, of course, being uh The Wandering Inn at 1,400 words, I believe, for the first book. So or 1,400 pages, sorry. Pages. Um it's absolutely crazy. Uh then of course the word count for the listen through. Most Lit RPG books uh on the uh audiobooks are going to run at least 12 hours. That's the uh kind of the sweet spot. 120,000 words, about 12 hours worth of listening time for a credit off of audiobooks.

SPEAKER_00 38:11

So absolutely amazing. And it's fascinating because it's such a counterpoint to how most other genres function, including science fiction and fantasy. So this whole lit RPG to me is fascinating on all these different levels. You got this kind of cauldron of creativity where writers share their stuff, you've got an enormous community of people who are into it, you've got books that are much, much longer and more detailed than your average science fiction, fantasy, and even romance. And it sounds like there's this enormous lit RPG community where people are reading 10, 15 books a month and they're totally into it. So you've got a captive audience, you've got an entrenched style, you've got your masters doing their work, and then you've got a lot of other writers too who are joining the ranks and participating. So I think a lot of folks don't even know about you guys. And I'm gonna put a link in the description below of this of this network that you're talking about. I'm gonna go check it out because it's fascinating. And lastly, one of the biggest challenges for indie authors and people who are just trying to get a toehold in publishing is to find and connect with an audience. And you guys are rocking it in terms of there's the audience, there's the community, and if you're good at it and enthusiastic about it, dive in swimming, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:43

Yeah. Um, I like talking with the uh with my readers. I got a Patreon, I've got a few people on there that'll comment uh when I publish chapters, and it's always fascinating how they come up and they pick through things, they'll be like, oh, this, and it's like, okay, yeah, I have that in there, and oh, but what about this aspect of this that was on this page back on this chapter? And it's like, okay, I hadn't thought about that, but okay, yeah, let me rewrite that to make it more consistent. But that's what you want is somebody that's reading and enjoying your work to the extent that, yeah, they're gonna come back and reread it. That's the fun part, is knowing that it's not just a quick obsession or a quick fix, that they're reading your work and rereading it. That's really what we're wanting to get is the kind of read that kind of readership. And a lot of the authors are getting that. I know of readers and listeners for Dungeon Crawler Carl that have listened completely to the system uh to the audiobooks again because Matt Deniman's next book is coming out on the 12th, which I am definitely not publishing anything on May the 12th because nothing else is going to be listened to or seen or heard until that book is finished. And probably by me too.

SPEAKER_00 41:18

And and as far as these beta readers go, like they they check it out, they provide feedback. Have you taken advice from your readers to tweak your own content and adjust the story or change stuff up? Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:35

You have to. Uh most of the writers have a little bit of OCD to them. So once they know that there's a little bit of an issue, they want to get it taken care of because we want to present to our readers the best work that we can.

SPEAKER_00 41:53

That's great. This does not happen this way. So, for example, I talk to a lot of writers in different genres, and for science fiction and fantasy, it's often a struggle for writers to find beta readers. They gotta put it out on their newsletter, like, hey, I'm looking for beta readers. And it's not really an integrated part of the process as far as the marketing aspect goes. It's usually like an inner circle of writers will share their stuff and they'll tweak it and then they'll polish it off and then they'll send it out there. But it sounds like in lit RPG, it's so engaging and dynamic that the readers are taking a pretty active role in in the content and are really pumping up the distribution. That's very, very interesting.

SPEAKER_01 42:40

It is. Um, and they're doing that through uh both uh well, sometimes they'll be looking for readers on Reddit, other authors will post it on Royal Road. Not everybody follows the exact same procedure, but I I generally post my things on Royal Road. Um, and then most will look for beta readers either on Facebook or Reddit. And if you can get three or four good people to read through your work and tell you what's working, what's not working, it's an absolute joy. Um, I know that uh one of the things that I I found was uh another author in a group I'm in called Writers Dojo, he posted the ABCD of doing a review or doing a uh beta read. So a what's working for it, what's not working, you know, that's been a real good help for me.

SPEAKER_00 43:53

Why is a writer's dream come true? This uh this subgenre of science. Science fiction and fantasy that frankly a lot of people don't know about, and I I hope more people do.

SPEAKER_01 44:05

It's I do too. Well, the more writers we get, the more readers we get, the stronger the community, and that's really what Lit RPG has been about for the past few years, is the community and the readers for us. Most of the writers I know are available on Facebook. I mean, sure, you might have to look them out, look them up a little bit, but they're there, and most of them are very easy to talk with. Um, most of them are very fun people, very open about what they're doing. Um, and of course, you you learn through them, and we've got a large community, you know, of course, people at Dragon Con. There was the people were the people at JordanCon over the what two weekends ago. And then we have the Little RPG Con that is, I believe, going to be in Denver again this year, and this is the second year that it's been held.

SPEAKER_00 45:11

Yeah, I was gonna ask you about cons because that's where you can actually meet authors and sell books directly, and the other genres like military science fiction, you got fantasy, they're out there, and this would be perfect for you guys too. Well, most authors do go to the conventions, but I didn't I didn't notice a lit RPG kind of thing going on. I was at the LA Comic-Con and Pasadena, I was just at the LA Festival of Books, and uh you guys, I don't think, have staked the claim yet, you know, in a very visible way, and it would be, I think, welcome to do that.

SPEAKER_01 45:50

It's happening. Um, you know, it it's slow. We uh what three years ago, we had a big convention, it was just after Dragon Con, the Sunday after, at uh the Atlanta uh aquarium, and most of the authors were there. They were giving out signed books and uh entire sets of books, and you could meet a lot of the different authors uh through there.

SPEAKER_00 46:24

That sounds ideal and an extension of all the vibrant stuff you have going online, too, in terms of the network and in terms of the participation. I want to ask you a little bit though about the format again. You were alluding to books in the 80s and the 90s, and I remember the uh finish the book kind of kind of text. So, for example, you'd be reading and it would say, you know, the character is about to jump out of the window. If you want the character to jump out the window, turn to page 82. And if you want the character to not jump out the window, keep going. Right. So that's interactive kind of writing. And then electronically, in the 80s, when the first PCs came out, before there were graphic cards and you didn't have these sophisticated graphic games, there's interactive fiction. I don't know if you're familiar with interactive fiction, Zork, Infocom, and you would type into there'd be a little blinky on the screen, and it would say, like you're standing in front of uh a boarded White House, there's a mailbox here, and then you type into the prompt just letters, no graphics, open the mailbox, and then it would respond. You open the mailbox and it reveals a leaflet, and then they had fantasy, they had science fiction, they had horror, they had detective stories, and you were the character going through the story. You were the protagonist. So your stuff reminds me a little bit like that. It's almost like a transcript of a game that you're reading, just like when you're on Twitch watching somebody play a video game. Uh Lit RPG has got a little bit of the style of eavesdropping on a game that's happening. It's not directly interactive because it's obviously words on a page or word on a screen, but it's got that interactive kind of flavor to it.

SPEAKER_01 48:23

Yeah, it's uh that's actually a very good analogy. Um, think of it exactly like those games, but you're actually seeing more of the system behind it. So it might be in the instance of you open the mailbox and it rolls dice in the background of what you find inside the mailbox, or what's behind that door, or different things like that. But yes, I remember the 1980s games very well. Um, everything was an ASCII. Um, let's see, the Temple of Apse was one of the games that we had when I was a kid, and it was uh like a roguelike today. Actually, it basically was a roguelike, uh, where it would populate a dungeon and you would move your character through the dungeon. Um, so yeah, grow growing up with video games as I did, it kind of was a pivotal thing for us.

SPEAKER_00 49:32

Writing is in a weird place right now. So social media is taking over the world. Now we got AI, and everyone's into multimedia, video, especially, and even interactive video again with the AI. And in ways, lit RPG is kind of a throwback, it's a little bit like vinyl records, right? So you're reading, you're actually reading words on a page. Already that's kind of weird for the younger generation, they don't read that much, and then you're adding this element, this overlay of this interaction between the system, the characters, the system and the characters and the reader, but it's on a page, it's static. So to me, you guys are kind of like a throwback and at the same time more advanced because you're integrating all these things in a very creative way. Does that make sense as an outsider? It's kind of weird, it seems fun, it's got a lot of a lot of opportunity to to to blow up in your head, but it's uh it's eccentric in this kind of way.

SPEAKER_01 50:46

It is, um, but again, it's one of those things that after a while it seems very natural. I've talked to readers that they get so used to it that they're okay. I was reading such and such a book, and it didn't have anything in there about a system or anything, and it was making me nervous because you know, and and it it just suddenly becomes something that is there.

SPEAKER_00 51:17

Created its own style, its own subgenre, and then people who are into it are into it, so that when they read something that isn't system-based, doesn't have the prompts and the stats, then they're like, hey, where where's the scaffolding? Where's this other narrator? You start to miss it because you're used to that structure and style. You're a fan. If you listen to a lot of Metallica, then you know, even if it's megadeth, you might not dig it. So you get into the tribe, you get into what's going on, and for lit RPG, it's its own distinct thing. And that I think is part of its strength because that's how you build community. You gotta be different, you gotta wave the flag, you gotta be you gotta be uh boastful almost of how you're different from the from the rest, and then kind of cut your own way.

SPEAKER_01 52:13

Yeah. Well, it it is partly that, but it's also very unique, I think, in the fact that it's just kind of blown up as it has. Again, Matt Dinneman is a lot of the cause of that, but it's I I I actually think that it would have without him to some extent, it just would have taken a little bit longer.

SPEAKER_00 52:40

Every genre needs its superhero, right? To to kind of pave pave the way, and then uh it electrifies the community, and then people people jump on board, both writers and and readers. From your estimation, what works and what doesn't? So I can see it getting a little out of hand with the systems and the rankings and the world building. One of the challenges, especially in science fiction and fantasy, is people spend so much time with the window dressing, they don't really focus on the characters as much as they should. And then it's just props and gimmicks. And on the plus side, just like you mentioned, you're accentuating all of these character traits in a way that normally wouldn't happen in regular prose. So I'm assuming it's striking a balance and picking up best practices as a writer and even as a reader that make it a compelling story and not just an exercise in copying a video game.

SPEAKER_01 53:44

There is actually. If you don't want to listen to this, you can go on and hit the fast forward button to the next chapter, which is fantastic for a lot of readers who don't want to listen to that part. They just want the story. Or, you know, so there's that. Um that's also a breakdown which we call game lit, which is yes, it's still game lit with a system, it's just not that lit RPG aspect of having the RPG character sheets and so heavily into the system. So there's you know a lot of different aspects. So if you're ever on a uh forum and somebody, oh, I'm looking for something that's really crunchy, they mean they want heavy numbers because that's what they're into. Um, every writer's going to be different. I try and strike a balance. The balance that I'm going for is to tell more story with less. Um, I sent you a copy of something that I was working on that I actually just finished. I've been working on that's uh for about three years called Digital Doctrine. Not little RPG, but it kind of tangentially is related to the Apprentice of Arabella series. It happens 60 years ahead before that. So it has an AI in it, but it's kind of defining what AI is in the future and how the AIs work or their base parameters. Uh, absolutely no stats, nothing about the character's strengths or weaknesses, it's just pure storytelling from that aspect. Where apprentice of Arabella, he's in a game, and so his character in the game has stats and abilities and everything there.

SPEAKER_00 56:31

I like your prose. It's slick and you get to it. There's nothing extraneous, it reads fast and has depth to it. So I I liked it what you what you showed me and what I read. So I can tell that you're not as you're not a spring chicken. You've got your hours honing your craft, which is still work on it.

SPEAKER_01 56:54

I've got exercises I do uh usually once, twice a week to try and improve my writing.

SPEAKER_00 57:02

Well, you got a good baseline already. I I thought, you know, I do a lot of reading, I read all the stuff from all my guests, and uh just your pros in its essence is smooth and easy to digest and just descriptive enough to be compelling. So kudos, kudos, kudos to your to your pros. Uh, in terms of readers, how do you think it distributes? Crunchy, non-crunchy, game lit? Do people like the crunch more than the emo character-driven stuff? What's honestly?

SPEAKER_01 57:38

I think that it's probably split 50-50.

SPEAKER_00 57:41

Yin and Yang, like two sides of the brain. And uh, it's interesting that the genre can appeal to both by dialing up one, dialing down the other, and depending on how you play it. And kudos to you also for changing up your style. Not many writers do that. A lot of writers will get into one style that works, and then every book is just pretty much template from that one.

SPEAKER_01 58:04

Well, for me, it starts with what if, and sometimes that what if goes completely off the rail, sometimes it doesn't. Um, sometimes goes completely wrong. I had one that I did last year that I just it wasn't selling well, I took it off, but it was a story where the writer is writing a journal. So you're reading the journal entries, and he's a an intern that gets a job at the government, and he's like, I wish I'd paid more attention, I shouldn't be here. Uh, they told me I was working going to be working with uh uh scientists, they didn't tell me that they were going to be making anthropomorphic dogs for the military, and so it goes from that aspect, uh, and it was supposed to be very comedic, but like I said, it did not sell very well.

SPEAKER_00 59:06

You know, you don't know until you know. And what I also find interesting is that you write to get read. There's there's some writers who just write it and throw it out there, and they won't think twice about really an audience. And other writers are like, Well, if I'm writing and nobody reads it, what's the damn point? And maybe they're telling me something. So if it's not working, it's not working, especially if you've got a targeted audience that's hungry for this kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 59:34

Yeah. Well, for this, it is a targeted audience, but there's no bad story, it's just an author that hasn't found their readership, and they may not have found exactly the right style for them. Um it takes work, it takes a lot of work. There's been more than a few sleepless nights, and my wife telling me, Hey, look, I need help with the kids, which you know can be fair sometimes, but it's just something that you fall into, and you have to try not to get stuck in the story. That's one of the things that uh many authors do is they get stuck in their story, not thinking exactly how the story might have an impact on some of the readers. Um, one of the things that has happened with other writers is they will have very adult situations, and then they will throw it out there for the readers and not realize, hey, maybe somebody 18 doesn't need to be reading that. Or maybe we need to back off on the spicy language. Um as you read some of my work, you might find that there's not a lot of spicy language because I'm thinking, what if my kids listen to it?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:08

What is the age target for your stuff and for lit RPG in general? I'm sure there's gradations of this, and I'm sure there's writers who are maybe spicier on purpose and they're known for that. But what's the general age range for your readership?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:24

The general age range, I think, is going to be 18 to about 36. Um, the older kids or or older teenagers, uh, realistically, probably the 28, 20 year, 20-year-old, 25, 26, right in that general range, because that's the way that a lot of the protagonists are written as younger people. Um, let's see. Randly Ghost Town, I believe, the main character in that is 1819. Uh, the same with uh he who fights with monsters. He's probably about 22, 23 when the story starts. Um, so most of the stories are written towards that age range, with the characters being that. Aether Earth 1953, John, he is 28, 29 years old in the story, but he's also lived a lot. Um, when you get into it, he's just gotten out of serving in the military for the past 11 years. He joined at the age of 17 in World War II. So that's a vast difference as far as his perspective to somebody of his age range. Um, I'm trying to think of other stories that the main characters are a little bit older.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:55

Um how about gender? So I'm tacitly assuming mostly male readers, but I could be totally wrong. Is it 50-50 male-female?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:06

Actually, uh, the reader dynamics for LitRPG, I would say that it's probably about 60 to 65 percent male readers, 35% female readers, and you can see that also broken up as far as the main characters. Um, some of the bigger ones with female characters, Judicator Jane, uh, Astarinth Healer, um, Beneath the Dragon Eye Moon uh has a female character, of course. So there are some very strong female characters in here, and that is one of the aspects that you will see is that there are strong female characters, but they don't generally take the route of, say, a lot of romance stories where the female characters have to emasculate the male characters to be successful. The women are successful on their own through their own efforts and their own abilities while being in conjunction with male characters who are also there and also strong characters in their own right.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:13

Um so that'll appeal to both, right? So you got strong female characters, and they don't get steamrolled or they're not just a property for the story. So both genders like it.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:28

Yeah. Um and again, we also have a lot of female writers in the genre. Dawn Chapman, she's a longstanding writer in the genre. Um I believe Silky Moon, uh, she's the writer, I think it's a she. You would think so by the name, but sometimes you can't tell. But uh, there's also a lot of female writers in the genre, and we're actually getting a lot more. Um, you know, some people are like, oh, I'm gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:59

Women are playing more video games, too. Women are playing video games. So that that convergence makes sense. The gender dichotomy in video games is starting to ebb and flow, too.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:12

That's true, and it's also very telling that it had there's always been females in gaming, but you know, it's also been that sometimes men haven't been as patient with them, and so they'll do their own thing, which that's great. But some of the writers are fantastic, as Rint Healer, uh, very good. Uh Beneath the Dragon's Eye Moon. I think I've actually read the entire series except for the last two books. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:53

What about distribution by modality? So ebook, Kindle versus paper. Back hard copy. How does it shake out audiobook? How do people like to absorb the content?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:08

Um, I think the the content absorption rate is actually very interesting. Mostly it's ebook or audiobook. The breakdown, I think, would actually be about 65% ebook to 35% audiobook. And while you do have hardback copies or bound copies available, they're not even going to make one or two percent of your general sales, um, which completely different model. Um the ebooks, a lot of the reason I think that they're higher is because so many of the independent authors can't really afford to do audiobooks on them either yet, or they eventually plan on it if at all available. The reason being is the production costs are a little bit higher, and they have to be able to justify doing that production, whether it's through ACX or on their own, uh, finding a narrator to pay for them to be able to do it. Um, Aether Earth, it's got an audiobook. Um, it's actually pretty good. We've got the next audiobook coming out later on this month. Uh again, I'm hoping it doesn't come out across uh against Grunge and Crawler Carl cause. Don't want to get pasted on that.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:35

Uh and in terms of the press, you know, you you got a press stamp on your book, your publisher. What's that relationship like? Would you consider yourself hooked up with a publisher going indie? What's your status for what you're putting out?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:52

Not only I am an indie author, I only have the one series with a publisher. I would dearly love to get more because that is where one of the key aspects is you get the help, you get the knowledge. Um, Royal Guard Publishing has, I think, uh about 1200 published books out now as far as their catalog, which that's absolutely huge.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:19

Most of their work lit RPG specific, they're lit RPG publisher, or they do other stuff?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:25

They do a bunch of other stuff, but it's lit RPG adjacent. Some of it is lit RPG, some of it is dungeon core, some of it is um harem, which a lot of that in the lit RPG, more male-centric, of course, but they do a phenomenal job. They mostly do through uh the audiobooks, so that's one of the key aspects of why I went with them. But they also hooked me up with a great uh editor, and she's actually edited both of my past two books with them. Um again, very phenomenal job, very good books. I listened to a bunch of the different things to make sure that they were the people that I wanted to go through. And uh that's Marcus Schloss with uh Royal Guard Publishing. Um, there's a bunch of others that have just taken off. Um as far as the audiobook companies, I would say that most of the publishers in the Lit RPG area would be considered low-tier as far as the income they're producing. I don't really pay much attention to that, as probably I should, but they are doing very well for what they do because they know their genre, they know their readers, they know the right way to market their books where more traditional companies might not know. Um, if you ever get a chance, uh an example of this is if you ever get a chance, take a look at the first cover for Dungeon Crawler Carl, book one, and see what he did for his ebook. And apparently he's maintained rights for his e-books to publish those. While uh the I believe it's Penguin is his publisher for the hardback, they've got that right, and they came back with a completely different cover. And you look at the two covers and you're going, where did you this come from? This doesn't even look like the book. This doesn't look like you know, so they're getting a lot of the hype from the ebooks and from the audiobooks, and so that's helping them. I just don't think that the covers are really what's helping them sell so much. I mean, because you look at the cover, it's completely different. It looks like a video game, and it's very lighthearted. You know, you've got a guy running around in heart-covered boxer shorts, wearing a leather jacket, being chased by a bunch of goblins. You know, so it sounds like the publisher doesn't really understand the reader. I don't think I don't know if they do. Or, and this might be the other aspect, they're hoping to build a new type of readership by extending that bridge out and not showing it so much the comedic cover and being a little bit more serious.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:42

And what's the future of LitRPG from what you can tell? You know, uh AI is now putting a crunch on writers in general. To your point, AI books are being pumped out there by the thousands, millions, and writers are feeling pressure from every angle, not only creating their books, but getting them out there. It's unbelievably crowded. How does the next two to five years look for the genre and for what you're doing?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:11

Honestly, I don't know. Um I'm hoping that it's really good, really solid. But my thought is that we need to start looking at AI as a tool to be used, specifically for research. Um, when I was writing book two of Aether Earth, I needed to know what the um speed limit was in 1953 through Louisiana. Hint, there wasn't one. But I'm looking at it from what 60 years on, and going, okay, so where would I find this information? What and so I could use AI and say, hey, look, I want you to take a look on this stretch of road, tell me what the um stated rules for the road was at the time, and it comes back with generally it was not uh roads were not capped as far as the speed limits. Okay, that seems counterintuitive, but the state highway laws and national highway laws didn't come into place until the 1960s, and that's what it was able to tell me. Do you know how long it would have taken me to find that on my own, trying to Google it?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:32

James Elroy, who wrote LA Confidential, he's awesome, but he's got a bunch of people just doing research for him, or at least he did, with little index cards, and he spends like a year outlining the book and doing his RD. But uh, I use Google, you know, the super Google, you know, AI to find stuff. You know, it's not cheating, it's just getting to the point faster rather than reading through a dozen different websites about Texas highways, right? Till you find it.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:03

Work smarter, not harder. Because I didn't have to spend hours researching that, that's hours that I could actually spend writing the book.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:11

Right. I agree totally. There's a there's a silver lining to this AI stuff, which is you could write better and faster without really breaking your own rules of what constitutes being a good writer, which is pedal to the metal, put your passion into it, put your lived experience into it. And to your great point, connect with your readers, know what they like, listen to them, and embrace the genre which you adore, which it sounds like you're doing in droves.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:42

Well, I I try to, and it's absolutely fun. One of the other things that I do a lot of times is try and help other new writers um on Facebook or on Reddit, you know. Oh, I need to how do I market myself? How do I do this? Well, this is what I've done in the past, this is what I've done that didn't work, this is what I've done that did work. So that's the other thing, too, that I'm seeing with little RPG. A lot of times, other writing groups they want to keep their secrets to themselves, they want somebody to help them, but they don't want to help anybody else. Here, the writers are helping the new writers become better writers. Because the I I believe that the actual theory is that a rising tide lifts all boats. And that's kind of the way that I'm trying to look at it and help other people because if they develop more readers uh in the genre, they might find my work.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:44

I have to say that this podcast here, episode I think 47 or 48 of the science fiction factory. I got other podcast shows too, but just within science fiction and fantasy, this to me has been the most interesting in terms of uh a newer genre that I wasn't that familiar with. And when you you open up the hood and I can look in there with you, it exemplifies all the best practices that a lot of others that other writers have either been talking about or hoping to achieve. Built-in community, collaboration, writing to get read, help with marketing and distribution, a cool format that's refreshing and and very creative and innovative, and really a passionate community of both writers and readers who are all vested. And I gotta check out that what is it, the Royal Road uh network. It's just such a great opportunity for creatives and readers to interact with each other in ways they never do in the other four.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:46

It is. Uh, right now, I think there's about 60,000 different books on Royal Road that's available, some of them completed, some of them not completed, but it's been absolutely phenomenal seeing that amount of growth. And again, some of the biggest litRPG writers got started there and discovered there.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:09

Love it. That's great. You know, Andy Weir is the biggest sci-fi fantasy writer now. He's got the Hail Mary movie, and he did it the old school hard way. He had a blog and then he created a mailing list pretty much from scratch, and he had to build that Mofo up every email by email. And he ended up, I think he mentioned, with like maybe as many as 20,000, 30,000 people, but it took him 10 years, and this was when the internet was just starting to get really cranked, you know, 20, 20 odd years ago. And uh, you have a unique opportunity that all of your lit RPG minions are taking advantage of. Just dive in, swimming. All the readers are there, they're hungry for this kind of content. And if you got even a modicum of talent and enthusiasm, you could just start participating immediately and get all the all the benefits instead of spending hours, days, weeks online just trying to find community and connect with people. I wish, I wish more people would do this kind of uh setup. It's brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:17

Well, it's growing every week. We see new writers coming in, new books coming on. There's books that you know we don't even sometimes even know are going to come out. Um, when I got started, you might see three or four new books a month. Now it's sometimes three and four new books a day.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:40

This is just getting going. Thank you for being a guest. Thank you for having me, ladies and gentlemen. Matthew Kent, Lit RPG, Maestro, turning us on to the genre. If you haven't been turned on before, if you're familiar with it, then we got to look under the hood and dive in. And you gave us some great best practices and insights. So whether you're a writer, you're a reader, I found this really interesting too, which is just I gotta check this stuff out and maybe pick up a few of these good habits for my own writing. So thank you for joining us, Matthew. I'm gonna have all your links and descriptors below. Check out your books, go to Royal Road, and if you're into it and even just curious about it, dive in. All right, thank you much. I appreciate it. It's been great talking with you. Thank you. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. All right, like, comment, share, subscribe.