I am Murray Jensen. I live in Brisbane, I have a four year old plus older daughters, and I run a small web design business. Life is hectic. That matters more to this site than it probably sounds like it should.
I listen to LitRPG constantly. Walking the dog, hanging the washing, doing the dishes. Any gap in the day and the headphones go in. I am about ninety per cent listener and ten per cent reader these days, which is a big part of why this site treats audio as the main event rather than an afterthought.
The thing that started this
Roughly three quarters of my mates have no idea this genre exists. These are blokes who game, who will happily sit through every epic fantasy film ever made, who read fantasy novels. And LitRPG has gone straight past them.
That bothers me more than it should. It is the best genre going, and there is a whole audience standing right next to the door without knowing the door is there.
So this site is written for them as much as for people already in it. If you have never read a progression fantasy in your life and you are not sure what the fuss is about, you are exactly who I am writing for.
He Who Fights with Monsters, since you asked
I have listened to the whole thing about seven times. Twelve books, close to 270 hours, seven times through.
I am not going to dress that up. It is my comfort read. When I cannot sleep I put it on and listen until I drift off, and I have done that for years now. It got me through some genuinely rough stretches. Shirtaloon wrote a laid-back Australian bloke into a world that takes itself far too seriously, Heath Miller read it, and between them they made something I keep going back to.
That is the sort of thing I want this site to be able to say out loud. Not just “here are the top ten”, but “here is what this one did to me”.
What this site does, and what it will not do
Level Up Fiction exists to answer two questions honestly.
First, which subscription actually suits you. Audible, Kindle Unlimited, both, or neither. The honest answer is often “neither yet” or “not the one you were about to sign up for”, and I would rather say that than take the commission.
Second, what to read, in what order, and whether it is worth your time. Reading orders, series guides, and proper starting points for people coming in cold.
Some rules I hold myself to:
- Every book fact gets checked against a primary source before it goes up. Series order, book counts, narrators, release dates, what is actually on Audible or in Kindle Unlimited today. Retailers contradict each other constantly, so I say which source I used.
- If I cannot trace a claim to a source, it comes out. It does not get softened, it comes out.
- I do not invent reader numbers, review quotes or sales figures.
- No prices anywhere on this site. They change weekly, they differ by country, and quoting them would mean lying to most of you. I send you to the listing instead.
- If something is not worth paying for, I say so.
I have not read every series in this genre and I am not going to pretend otherwise. When I am writing about books I have actually listened to, I will tell you. When I am working from research rather than experience, I will tell you that too.
How it makes money
Some links on this site are Amazon affiliate links. If you start an Audible or Kindle Unlimited trial through one, Amazon pays me a commission. It costs you nothing extra and it does not change what I write.
That is the whole business model. I am not paid by authors or publishers, I do not run sponsored reviews, and nobody has ever paid to be mentioned here. The full version is on the affiliate disclosure page.
The Australian corner
There is more Australia in this genre than most people realise, and I intend to make a bit of noise about it.
Shirtaloon, who writes He Who Fights with Monsters, is Australian. So is Haylock Jobson, who writes Heretical Fishing from the Gold Coast. Heath Miller, who narrates both series, trained at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and has spent most of his career working in his native Australia.
I am Australian, I write in Australian English, and I would rather lean into that than sand it off. Expect the Australian authors and narrators to get more attention here than they would on an American site.
Where this is heading
More reading orders. More honest subscription comparisons. Proper “you have never read LitRPG, start here” guides for people arriving from fantasy or from gaming.
I also want to keep track of what happens to these series beyond the page. Adaptations, graphic novels, anything that actually gets announced. That will live on the series pages themselves and get updated when something happens, rather than sitting in a news feed full of speculation that goes stale.
And eventually a way to keep in touch, so people who care about this stuff are not relying on a search engine to find each other.
Say hello
This is one bloke with headphones and a laptop, not a content team churning out lists.
If you have a series I should be listening to, if you think I have a fact wrong, or if you just want to argue about which book a series really finds its feet in, I want to hear it. I am at murray@levelupfiction.com and I read everything that lands there. Being told I am wrong about a book is my favourite kind of email.