The term litRPG, which stands for literary role-playing game, has been around for more than a decade, but even avid genre fiction readers may be unfamiliar with it or have trouble defining it.
“A lot of people think it’s interactive or choose-your-own-adventure style books, and that’s absolutely not it,” says Matt Dinniman, author of the popular Dungeon Crawler Carl series. In litRPG, he explains, “The characters are aware of some aspect of the world being gamified.” Moreover, as he wrote in a recent Writer’s Digest article, “game-like elements, such as player stats, are an essential part of the story.”
Dungeon Crawler Carl, like most litRPG series, was originally self-published. Ace picked up print rights to books one through six—it’s the imprint’s first litRPG acquisition—and a TV adaptation from Universal and Seth MacFarlane is in the works. As the litRPG world begins to attract more mainstream attention, PW spoke with Dinniman and other authors and editors about the format’s appeal.
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On the website of Level Up, the imprint that U.K. publisher Ockham Books launched in 2019 as a home for litRPG and its cousin, game lit (think: books like Ready Player One), Conor Kostick, who heads up the imprint, explains litRPG’s origins. EKSMO, Russia’s largest publishing house, coined the term in 2013 while developing a series of books inspired by MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. In English, RPG lit would make more sense, but the name litRPG stuck.
LitRPG titles, he writes, share “an explicit attention to the game mechanics of their respective worlds. Seeing the workings of the game—the amount of damage done, the experience gained, the choices after leveling up—all proves very entertaining. What is LitRPG? Well, it’s often the reading equivalent of watching someone playing a game on Twitch or Youtube.”
Julie Constantine, senior director of acquisitions at Podium, says the litRPGs she acquires all have to have “gaming mechanics built into the world.” Many of the books fall under the isekai subgenre, in which the protagonist is transported to a different realm. (Isekai is a Japanese term meaning “another world.”) Forthcoming isekai from Podium include An Education in Magical Affairs (Apr. 2025), book three in the I’m Not the Hero series by Sourpatch Hero.
While fantasy trappings are particularly popular, Constantine notes that litRPGs can take many forms. Future Podium releases include book four in Nicholas Searcy’s cyberpunk Mistrunner series (Dec.), book four in Ted Steel’s Player Manager sports fiction series (Oct.), and Mystic Neptune’s second I Ran Away to Evil rom-com (Nov.).
For this reason, some authors, including Seth Ring, see litRPG not as a genre but as a stylistic choice. “It supersedes genre in that you can write almost any genre into it and still make it a litRPG,” Ring says. He’s written quasi-western fantasy and horror litRPG novels, and his forthcoming series launch Advent (Blackstone, Mar. 2025) is science fiction: a dishwasher with big dreams joins the fight to protect his city from an alien threat.
Blackstone Publishing bought world rights to Advent and five more books in the series in January, marking the publisher’s first all-rights litRPG acquisition. The indie also has a strong line in publishing and distributing litRPG in audio: Blackstone Library currently lists 144 litRPG titles, 114 of them releasing in 2024 alone.
Orbit Books, meanwhile, is releasing its first litRPG title in January through its new digital imprint, Orbit Works. Level: Unknown is by David Dalglish, a traditional fantasy author, avid gamer, and relative newcomer to litRPG. The book follows a researcher on a barren planet who activates an alien artifact that pulls him into a world of knights, magic, and monsters. “It’s very similar to a magic system and combat that I would do in one of my normal fantasy novels,” Dalglish says, “except now there’s more structure and rules.” Writing litRPG meant developing new skills, such as choosing the correct moment for a character to level up.
LitRPG allows Dalglish to be “lighthearted and playful,” he says, a refreshing change from the grimmer books he’s written for Orbit. With earlier novels, he’d often receive comments about how readers could “practically hear the dice rolling in the background” or how the healing potions made it feel like a video game. At the time, these comments were seen as negative; litRPG, he says, has given him a space to unapologetically embrace gaming conventions.
Level: Unknown will be available in e-book, audio, and for print-on-demand. Orbit editor Stephanie Clark says that litRPG’s gaming elements are attractive to readers, and especially to listeners of audiobooks. “People are used to hearing character dialogue; they’re used to seeing their characters leveling up on screen,” Clark says. “It’s just like they’re playing a video game, and they’re looking for that experience in a narrative.”
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Many litRPG authors found their readers by serializing stories on platforms such as Royal Road or Wattpad. “The serial storytelling format is addictive,” Constantine says. “In a video game, when a character kills the monster, they get an achievement unlocked, or they get new experience points that let them level them up.” Similarly, as each new serialized chapter releases, “There’s a bit of a dopamine hit.”
Honour Rae began serializing her series All the Skills, a coming-of-age story with a card-based magic system, on Royal Road in June 2022. She gained enough of a following that some fans pay for early access to new chapters via Patreon.
Podium already had the audio rights when Rae self-published the first e-book on Kindle Unlimited in December 2022, Constantine says. Since then, Podium has worked with Rae to simultaneously launch audio editions with each e-book volume, with the recent releases hitting the top 100 lists for Amazon and Audible. Based on this success, Podium acquired print rights for All the Skills; book one is out in October and book two follows in April.
Like Rae, Ring enjoys strong reader engagement for the litRPG titles he serializes online. “The genre definitely cultivates superfans,” he says. Readers often contact him with thoughts on where a story should go, and it’s not uncommon for fans to purchase a book in multiple formats as they become available. Ring published his first series, Titan, for free on Royal Road and Wattpad while also offering a subscription service through Patreon and selling the books in all formats on Amazon.
Dinniman originally intended to publish his Dungeon Crawler Carl series solely on Royal Road, but in 2020, when pandemic travel restrictions curtailed his ability to do his job, he started a Patreon, interacting directly with fans by allowing them to vote on what should happen to the characters next. He later began self-published the books in paperback, and the series took off once Soundbooth Theater released audiobook versions. By the time Ace picked up the first three books in April 2024, Dinniman had sold 800,000 copies of books one through six across print, e-book, and audio.
The series follows the title character, a Coast Guard vet who’s stuck in a sadistic, alien-run game show with his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut. The Ace hardcovers began pubbing in August; book three, The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, is due out in October. In 2026, Ace will publish a standalone novel from Dinniman, Operation: Bounce House, that doesn’t stray far from his litRPG roots. Jess Wade, the Ace executive editor who acquired Dinniman’s books, is among those who think litRPG is leveling up.
“I’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and there’s nothing more fun than when there’s a new, exciting area of science fiction and fantasy that’s exploding,” Wade says. “It feels great to get new readers to come to the genre.”
Vivian Nguyen is a writer and editor in Southern California.
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