Half of all Americans have listened to an audiobook — it’s a $2 billion industry. One of the most prolific narrators is Julia Whelan, who’s given her voice to 700 books, including Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Tara Westover’s Educated, and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
“A lot of miles on my voice now,” Whelan tells KCRW.
Her prep is extensive for this work, she explains. “I'm used to rehearsal. I'm used to building out a character. … I need to understand what the lay of the land is. And in this job, particularly, the last thing you want to have happen is something catch you unawares.” She tells a story she heard of someone voicing a character for 350 pages, then reaching the line “he said in his husky Russian accent.” That meant redoing all of the dialogue.
And so, when Whelan reads a book ahead of time, she keeps a list of words that she doesn’t know how to pronounce and must research, plus a list of a character’s vocal traits and important biographical details. Then she builds the “constellation of characters.” She also needs to understand the tone of the book and main message(s) the author wants to convey.
Whelan also loves consulting with authors beforehand, she says, but mainly she relies on her own interpretation.
The job is performative as well. “If I walked around my house making dinner, and I was talking like my narrative voice, my husband would be like, ‘Are you okay? Did you have a stroke?’ … As an actor, I'm inhabiting a role when I go into that narrative.”
Julia Whelan sits in a recording booth. Credit: Audiobrary.
Whelan’s career actually began in her youth, when she portrayed a teenaged daughter on the TV series Once and Again, created by Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz. She says the show spoiled her, so she didn’t realize what the rest of Hollywood was like in the late 90s for a young woman. “It turns out — terrible.”
Whelan then left the business and earned a college degree in creative writing. “And then this just sort of happened, and it ended up being the perfect blend of the two things I'm really passionate about. And I don't have to deal with the toxicity of Hollywood,” she says.
Whelan admits that nepotism landed her the voiceover business. She explains that a close college friend’s mom was an audiobook director and producer at Brillance, an audio publishing company that was independent before Amazon bought it. The mom approached Whelan during her college graduation ceremony, and knowing her skill, said she’d be good at the gig. However, at the time (2008-2009), Whelan had no idea what an audiobook was.
“It wasn't really something you could go out and decide to create a career in. Everyone I know from that generation, we fell backwards into this job. And it was always a question of, ‘Do you know someone who can do this?’ We were pulling people off the street a little bit.”
Now a specific career path exists, with people investing in a home studio, coaching/training, and networking groups, she explains.
“A lot of people will say something like, ‘My kids love when I read to them, and I should really do this job.’ And I always want to say, ‘Okay, well, why don't you first … just try going into an airless room for eight hours and read, and see how much you can do it fluidly without making mistakes. See if you still love it after eight hours.’ Because I would know a lot of actors who will try to do it. They think it's going to be great, and then … they spend one day in the studio, and they just think, ‘Get me out of here.’”
The job is deceptively hard on your voice, Whelan emphasizes, so she’s had to adjust her recording schedule. During her early years, she recorded 70-80 books annually. Then she lost her voice, and a doctor warned that she’d lose her career if she didn’t stop talking for at least a month. Now Whelan spends four to five hours per day in the booth, hydrates constantly, avoids places that require her to yell, and abstains from alcohol on nights before a recording session. She’s even done physical therapy for the job because it involves a lot of sitting.
Is there someone listening and judging her recordings? About 95% of the time, no, she says. She typically records herself, sends the files to be cleaned up, receives corrections to misreads, then fixes and resends.
So far, an author has never told Whelan that they didn’t like her reading style and wanted her redo it. “I've had, actually, remarkably the opposite experience. Mostly, it's an author saying, ‘I can't believe you voiced exactly what was in my head, exactly how I heard this character, that's how it came to life.’ And I always tell them, ‘Well, that's what was on the page, that's how I interpreted it. That's really all you.’”
Other authors have said they didn’t want to hear anyone else read their work, “and that is also completely fair,” Whelan adds.
Now with artificial intelligence, Whelan has been trying to diversify her work, mainly by starting her own audio publishing company.
She doesn’t feel combative toward AI, however, and sees it as a useful for comparison.
“When you have something … that can just read the text and do it perfectly … we're going to get to the point where we definitely can't tell the difference. But if we know the difference, will that change our behavior? Will we support the artists that are still doing this? … We have a fireside storytelling tradition that predates written storytelling. And I happen to think it’s an elemental part of the human condition. And therefore, I don't think it's going anywhere. But I obviously think in the corporatization and commodification of it, it will change. … It will serve to make human-voiced audiobooks all the more special, and might actually result in the kind of recognition I think is severely lacking in this industry, that it is an art form, it is a craft.”
Think of AI as a plastic plant, she suggests. “It is always perfect and is low-maintenance and serves a purpose. But there's a reason people still have real plants — because they're invested in it.”