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Netflix show ‘My Oxford Year’ is based on Julia Whelan’s 2018 literary debut – Credit: Chris Baker\/Netflix<\/p>\n
The project that changed Julia Whelan\u2019s life was a huge success and one of her biggest frustrations all at the same time: Gillian Flynn\u2019s 2012 crime novel Gone Girl<\/a>.<\/p>\n Flynn\u2019s tale following professor Nick Dunne and the mysterious disappearance of his wife Amy was a New York Times bestseller and the inspiration for an Oscar-nominated film<\/a>. The book eventually sold more than 10 million copies \u2014 including sales of the audiobook, which was beloved for Whelan\u2019s smooth and melodic voice acting performance of Amy. Flynn, the various book agents, the book\u2019s editor, and the publisher all received substantial royalties for the continued success of Gone Girl. Whelan and fellow voice actor Kirby Heyborne, who narrated the part of Nick, each got a check for $2,500 and not a single cent more. \u201cI always joke that that\u2019s my villain origin story,\u201d Whelan tells Rolling Stone.<\/p>\n More from Rolling Stone<\/p>\n While Whelan might not be a household name, her impact on the literary landscape is undeniable. She\u2019s one of the most sought-after audiobook narrators, the voice behind more than 600 famed titles, including Emily Henry\u2019s <\/a>Happy Place, Rebecca Makkai\u2019s I Have Some Questions For You, and Otessa Moshfegh\u2019s BookTok hit <\/a>My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The New Yorker has called her the \u201cAdele of audiobooks.\u201d She was nominated for a Grammy for audiobook direction. Oh, and she also writes her own screenplays and novels.<\/p>\n On Aug. 1, Netflix will premiere My Oxford Year, the film adaptation of Whelan\u2019s 2018 literary debut. But while the new film should, and very well could, be a breakthrough moment for Whelan, right now she has a different focus: Whelan wants to harness the rising interest in audiobooks<\/a> \u2014 and her own influence in the space \u2014 to secure better deals for narrators. And she\u2019s doing this rather unsexy work through an unlikely medium: romance novels.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re dealing with books about emotional connection, about relationships, audiobooks are unmatched,\u201d Whelan explains \u201cBut narrators are not part of the system of success. We\u2019re so far beyond it\u2019s not fair. It\u2019s actually unethical.\u201d<\/p>\n Whelan wrote and recorded the audiobook version of My Oxford Year in the midst of a heavy slate of narration work. It was a grueling schedule \u2014\u00a0she recorded 70 books in 2017 \u2014 and one that she says highlighted just how many \u201cstandard\u201d audiobook industry practices were setting up actors to fail, or worse, endanger their health and well-being. The average audiobook voice actor is paid per finished hour, so they get a set price when they turn in the recording of a finished book, which can clock in anywhere from eight to 17 hours. But what those payments don\u2019t address is the time spent recording. For every completed hour of audio someone like Whelan produces, it takes several more to actually record. This means voice actors are pushing to spend as little time as possible on one project before hopping to another, adding on pressure and stress. For her, Whelan says it led to a serious emotional and physical breakdown.<\/p>\n \u201cAudiobooks are so poorly paid that you really have to do volume to keep your head above water,\u201d she says. \u201cI had to go on vocal rest because I got a cold. I got back in the studio too soon, because I was so worried about meeting a deadline. It turned into laryngitis. I went in to see a doctor, and they just said, \u2018You have to not talk for a month or you\u2019re probably never going to do this again.\u2019 That\u2019s why I think it\u2019s a very dangerous model to only get paid per finished hour, as opposed to being incentivized through a royalty structure when the books do well.\u201d<\/p>\n Whelan\u2019s answer to this at the moment? Romance audiobooks. Romance might seem like a poor answer to institutionalized long hours and poor pay, but Whelan notes that the pandemic drove up the popularity and success of the medium, a growth that\u2019s still continuing nearly five years later. During Covid lockdown, people became obsessed with romance \u2014 especially listening to these stories as told by voice actors. According to the Audiobook Publishers Association<\/a>, sales grew another 13 percent in 2024, maintaining their existence as a multibillion-dollar industry. Audio versions of books have gotten so popular that in 2024, HarperCollins reported<\/a> that audiobook sales surpassed e-books for the first time in the publisher\u2019s history. Even with those stats, Whelan is intimately aware of how many people dismiss romance as less intellectually rigorous than literary fiction, mostly because she used to do that herself.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d been through a creative writing program that basically told me genre was not worth anybody\u2019s time. And when I started doing this job, and I had to read things that were just being given to me that I would have never picked up on my own, I realized that there\u2019s incredible writing across all categories,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve very much enjoyed finding the authors who came out of writing programs and have specifically chosen to write in genre because they don\u2019t like this ivory-tower gatekeepy thing that says, you know, if there\u2019s a plot, it\u2019s not literature. I\u2019m very radicalized about this.\u201d<\/p>\n This growing interest in romance audiobooks is also happening alongside an investment in artificial intelligence by tech companies. Readers want more to listen to \u2014\u00a0and major publishing companies are trying to answer that demand by using AI. Amazon\u2019s Audible is deploying dozens of options<\/a> for AI narration<\/a>. (This includes the audiobook for Melania Trump\u2019s memoir Melania, which was created using AI-generated audio tracks.) For audiobook narrators already fighting for better pay, AI can seem like a hovering hammer. But while Whelan acknowledges the challenge, she notes that a large majority of audiobook listeners still prefer non-AI narrators.<\/p>\n \u201cAs we\u2019re all collectively trying to define what it means to be human right now, I think that we will want to hear real humans telling us real human stories,\u201d Whelan says. \u201cI\u2019ve said this jokingly to a lot of the male narrators: \u2018You guys are going to be the last one standing when the robot apocalypse happens.\u2019 Because women are always going to want to hear real men say naughty things in their ear.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2024, Whelan launched Audiobrary, a digital audiobook platform meant to host new audio-first projects and give the artists involved royalties based on performance. Some of the library\u2019s most anticipated projects are unique takes on romance. The debut release was Cassanova LLC, a steamy read taken directly from the pages of Whelan\u2019s second romance novel, Thank You For Listening. The most recent release is a new recording of Sierra Simone\u2019s 2016 Arthurian-inspired romance American Queen.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c[Audiobooks are] a multibillion-dollar industry with double-digit growth year over year for the last decade, [but] the audiobook narrator\u2019s rates have not followed that kind of growth,\u201d Whelan says. \u201cIt was getting to the point where I was so resentful of that, I was having a hard time getting in the booth and doing my job. So I had to feel like I was doing something. Audiobrary is just literally coming out of righteous rage.\u201d<\/p>\n Following today\u2019s release of My Oxford Year, Whelan is already back to recording her ongoing slate of projects. But she notes that while the audio world is bigger than ever\u00a0\u2014 including a recent TikTok obsession with audio erotica <\/a>\u2014 her focus remains specifically on audiobooks. \u201cI would want to find the right script or situation to do [different voice acting], but I don\u2019t have time,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Best of Rolling Stone<\/p>\n Sign up for RollingStone’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Netflix show ‘My Oxford Year’ is based on Julia Whelan’s 2018 literary debut – Credit: Chris Baker\/Netflix The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,34724,63,457,134,34722,34725,34726,34723],"class_list":{"0":"post-38854","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-audiobook-narrator","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-books","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-julia-whelan","14":"tag-kirby-heyborne","15":"tag-nick-dunne","16":"tag-voice-acting"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}