[davisp]

Royal Road is a place for a lot of folks to get audiences seeded before they inevitably move on to some combination of Patreon, Amazon Kindle Unlimited, and Audible.

One very notable example of this is Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. He's even just announced that he managed to sell publishing only rights to Ace for large scale distribution which to my knowledge is a first (from authors that started on Royal Road).

https://x.com/mattdinniman/status/1780998536529883622

Also, I'd highly recommend reading Dungeon Crawler Carl if you enjoy anything close to Douglas Adams-esque comedic sci-fi. Its definitely trends a lot more "adult" than Douglas Adams, but that's about as close as I can think of off the top of my head for comparison. And I'd very much recommend the Audible versions narrated by Jeff Hayes for anyone that does audio books. The Sound Booth Theater production is also good but I'd only recommend that if you're doing a re-listen.

[murphyslab]

The Dungeon Crawler Carl series' first 4 or 5 books (it's been a little while) were excellent. Carl's tone reminds me of a detective novel, while the setting is more reminiscent of Ready Player One and The Matrix. The genre is a LitRPG novel (admittedly a genre I'd never known existed until reading DCC), heavily doused with comedic elements. Lots of mature themes and references to sex, drugs, politics, and violence, but with some of the allegorical or illustrative critique (to the point of absurdity) you'd find with Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett when discussing serious topics with parallels to real life, in an imagined scifi/fantasy setting. I'd recommend the series if for those who haven't picked up a book in a while and who would appreciate those elements.