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Writer C.J. Box built a legion of fans obsessed with his long-running Joe Pickett crime series about a Wyoming game warden who battles corrupt government officials, crooked landowners, and other villains who have money or power or both.

Then he embraced podcasters.

He tapped into shows focused on the rodeo, fly fishing, hunting, and other outdoor and western subjects. Young men with fishing caps and long beards began to show up at his book signings, many telling him that they hadn’t been to a bookstore in years.

“It helped me build a male readership,” said Box, 66 years old. “Often this was the first book signing they’d been to. Some weren’t even sure what page to get the signature on. I loved it.”

Finding new readers is one of the biggest challenges facing writers, including those with established fan bases. Print book sales in 2024 through Dec. 7 were flat compared with the same period in 2023, according to book-tracker Circana BookScan. Some new titles have a price tag of $30 or more with little chance of being an impulse purchase.

Box now does more interviews with alternative media than with traditional TV, radio or newspapers. He appeared earlier this year on the MeatEater podcast hosted by author and outdoorsman Steven Rinella, whose audience is 90% male and ranks in the top 10 on Spotify’s sports chart.

Rinella said his listeners, who tune in for his often irreverent discussions of hunting, fishing and life in the wild, appreciated Box because “he’s got humility, he works, and he isn’t a blowhard, which people can sniff out.”

For more than two decades Box, whom everybody calls Chuck, has entertained readers with his vivid outdoor writing and the moral compass that Joe Pickett brings to his job. Over the course of more than two dozen novels, the fictional Wyoming game warden has grappled with villainous hedge-fund ranch owners, crooked federal bureaucrats and antigovernment fanatics.

Box grew up in Casper, Wyo., where his father was an elementary school principal and his mother taught at a school for the deaf. “My dad and uncle took me deer, antelope and elk hunting,” said Box. “I shot my first deer when I was 12 years old and I still have the antlers in my office.”

A journalism scholarship made it possible for him to attend the University of Denver. After graduation he worked for the Saratoga Sun, a local Wyoming weekly, and credits that with the ripped-from-the-headlines events in his novels.