Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl has raised more than $16.5 million on crowdfunding platforms across two campaigns. Its author started out drawing pet portraits at cat shows.
The larger campaign ran on BackerKit for Renegade Game Studios’ Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG and Dungeon Crawler Carl: Unstoppable, a card game. It launched April 14 with more than 65,000 followers already signed up, cleared its $250,000 goal within minutes, and closed May 19 at $13.29 million from 55,972 backers, about $237 apiece. ICv2 reports it is the most funded game in BackerKit history and the third most funded tabletop project on any platform, behind Cyberpunk TCG and Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere RPG. It passed Frosthaven’s $12,969,608 Kickstarter total. Backer fulfillment begins in October, with retail release in late November.
The second campaign was Dinniman’s Kickstarter for limited edition hardcovers of Books 2 and 3. From October 14 to November 14, 2025, it pledged $3,263,462 from 13,428 backers against a $49,000 goal, roughly 67 times the target.
The author’s path to those numbers ran through a newspaper obituary desk. Dinniman grew up an Army brat, settled in Tucson, and later wrote obituaries at a Yakima, Washington paper. He then made his living traveling to cat shows and drawing pets for their owners. Princess Donut, the series’ cat, came from a tortoiseshell Persian he saw at one show. He had published earlier books, including the Shivered Sky trilogy in 2003.
He began serializing Dungeon Crawler Carl on Royal Road in 2019. When the pandemic canceled the pet shows, he self-published it on Amazon in 2020. Jeff Hays narrated the audiobook, released in 2021 through Soundbooth Theater. Dinniman told Variety that when he finished Book 3, “I had maybe 500 people, 1,000 people reading it.” He now expects over a million readers for Book 8.
The premise: Carl, a Coast Guard veteran, and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, are pulled into an alien-run dungeon that turns Earth’s collapse into a televised game show. Carl enters wearing no shoes or pants. Eight novels are out: Dungeon Crawler Carl (2020), Carl’s Doomsday Scenario, The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook and The Gate of the Feral Gods (all 2021), The Butcher’s Masquerade (2022), The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (2023), This Inevitable Ruin (2024), and A Parade of Horribles (May 12, 2026). Two more books will close the series. Book 9 has no release date as of September 20.
Penguin’s Ace imprint acquired print rights in 2024, after the audience existed. Dinniman kept the ebook and audiobook rights. No Film School reports sales above 10 million copies by mid-2026. Books-A-Million named the series its first-ever Book of the Year in November 2025, and it made the 2026 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist.
The franchise now runs past the page. Vault Comics began a webcomic adaptation in July 2025. Universal International Studios and Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door are developing a TV series with Chris Yost attached, and Dinniman told Variety in March that he had read the first scripts. Playmates opened pre-orders September 24 for a $29.99 six-inch Carl and Princess Donut figure, due in October.
Ace came to Dinniman after his readers did. What does a publisher offer an author who already owns the reader list?
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White men for the win. Again.
Impressive, and a lot of people would be envious. It sounds like he had a pretty sad life up to the books and deserves his success. Still, I have avoided his books since it became clear he took the ticket.
I try not to support people who throw others under the bus to placate the mob who owns him.