![]() ![]() For the three decades that followed, the medium was largely seen as a helpful aid for visually impaired people until the industry began to shift with the invention of new technologies like the cassette tape. The audiobook was invented in its most primitive form back in 1932, when the American Foundation for the Blind built a recording studio and taped books on vinyl records that could fit 15 minutes of sound per side. The industry Whelan would come to inhabit comes from humble beginnings. ![]() The thing about Julia is, when she records your book, she knows your characters as well as you do. She sent in a demo, and the rest, as they say, is history. “I called her, and I was like, ‘So, what’s this thing with saying the books into a microphone? How does this work?’” she recalls. She told Whelan that she’d be great at narrating, given her background in acting combined with her degree in creative writing and English as well as her love of reading. At the time, the mother of one of her best friends was an audiobook producer and director. “That’s not how the business works.”Īfter a year of struggling to find work and subsequently taking up side gigs like tutoring, Whelan decided to tap into a resource she’d been offered during her college graduation. and get my old job back, and get on another TV show, and just pick up my life where I left it,” she explains with a laugh. “I really thought that I would graduate from school, I would go back to L.A. When she came back to the entertainment world as a young woman in her early 20s a few years later, however, she was hit by the hard realization that it wasn’t the same industry she’d left. When she was in her late teens, Whelan took a break from acting to attend Middlebury College and also spent time studying abroad at Oxford. ![]() “I just wanted to experience being as many different people as I could be in this world where we only get to be one person.” For Whelan, the goal was never to become famous. That was just baked into the cake really early.”ĭespite not coming from a family in show business, she soon began working as a child actor, starring in ABC’s family drama Once and Again (1999-2002) for three seasons and playing the titular role in the Lifetime television movie The Secret Life of Zoey (2002) alongside Mia Farrow, among other projects. I was an only child, so even before I could write, I would dictate stories to babysitters, and then I would act them out. “I was doing local children’s theater from the time I was 5 onward. “I was just one of those kids that kind of came out of the womb that way,” she tells Shondaland. She did, however, know from an incredibly early age that she loved acting. Like many in the field, 38-year-old Whelan didn’t start her career wanting to work on audiobooks. ![]() She’s as in demand as an actor can get in the world of audiobook narration, and she isn’t planning on stopping any time soon. Her impressive list of narration credits includes The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah, and Educated by Tara Westover, to name just a few. If you’ve listened to some of the most popular commercial audiobook releases - fiction, romances, thrillers, memoirs, and young adult - in the last decade or so, chances are that quite a few of them were read by Whelan. And when it comes to audiobooks, no other narrator is as prolific of an “auto-buy” narrator than Julia Whelan. It’s a connection that virtually every writer hopes to have with fans - and one that can be hard to come by.īut for quite a few readers who love audiobooks, it’s not necessarily an author who guides the selections they choose instead, they may follow the work of a particular narrator. In the world of book publishing, it’s not unusual for readers to have writers they call “auto-buy” authors: They’ll preorder every new release as soon as it goes on sale and then finish it the same day it comes out. ![]()
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