Building an Audience One Reader at a Time

I finally got around to Robert Birnbaum's interview with Jim Harrison this morning, and was intrigued by the extent to which the conversation dwells upon what is presented as Harrison's comparative obscurity:

My type of writer gains an audience by accretion. I don’t think it’s advertising or anything. Why do I read things? It’s basically word of mouth. Some friend or someone I know whose taste I respect says, “You gotta read this.” Then I read it. I rarely read or buy a book because of a review. I had noticed, it’s interesting, it’s getting a little more like France here, which is curious. There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can’t tell you why. I certainly don’t have a pop audience or a strictly literary audience. It’s all spread out. But that was very gradually acquired.

Also of note: the discussion's transition from the Unabomber to Richard Slotkin, one of my favorite historians...so much so that my grad school rat pack used to sketch out plans for a Chow Yun-Fat Western we'd call Gunfighter Nation. Here's a radio interview Slotkin did in 2001.