Julia Whelan is the voice of the summer: Meet the narrator of your favorite bestsellers

USA Today

a day ago

She's your favorite author's favorite audiobook narrator.
Julia Whelan is the voice of the summer, the smooth-talking vocals behind some of 2025's biggest books – 'Atmosphere' by Taylor Jenkins Reid, 'Great Big Beautiful Life' by Emily Henry and 'Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil' by V.E. Schwab, to name a few.
As an audiobook listener will tell you, the narrator can make or break a good listen. So what about Whelan has authors clamoring to get her on their stories?
It's more than just her voice and acting skills – Whelan has become the face of an industry known only for voice, a public figure in a social media era where readers have unprecedented access to the creatives that bring their favorite books to life. Whelan's voice on an audiobook can lead to a boom in sales.
There's a responsibility that comes with that, and Whelan is determined not to let it go to waste. Whelan is fighting for more pay and better working conditions for audiobook narrators, who do not receive royalties like other actors.
The voice behind Taylor Jenkins Reid, Emily Henry books
Credited to her English major background, Whelan is a 'generalist' reader – she's done romance, book club fiction, erotica, fantasy, thrillers and historical fiction. She's the voice of Tara Westover's memoir 'Educated,' Kristin Hannah's 'The Women' (for which she won an Audie Award), narrated a few chapters of Taylor Jenkins Reid's "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo' and all of Emily Henry's books. She's at a point in her career she calls 'an embarrassment of riches.'
The key to a Whelan narration is close collaboration. Sometimes that's sending voice memos back and forth to get pronunciation right, sometimes that's envisioning actors an author dreams would play their characters. For Laurie Forest's 'The Black Witch,' a series Whelan has been narrating since 2017, she worked with the author to create fictional accents for the fantasy world.
Sarah MacLean, a historical romance author whose first contemporary romance, 'These Summer Storms,' comes out July 8, said it was a 'dream' to get Whelan on her novel.
'She's just such an authentic person who cares so much about the adaptation of the book being perfect,' MacLean says. 'She says the audiobook is the first and best adaptation that you're ever going to get as a writer and I think that is so true and it's so powerful. I just trust her implicitly.'
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From child actor to renowned audiobook narrator
Whelan got her start as an actor when she was 9, with a notable role on ABC drama 'Once and Again' alongside Sela Ward and Evan Rachel Wood. She left acting in high school to study English in college, assuming she would resume her TV days after she graduated. But with the 2007-2008 writer's strike and recession, Whelan had to look elsewhere.
By the time she got in the booth, it was the 2010s boom of YA romance and dystopia, and Whelan's narration of these young protagonists filled an industry age gap. She did the 'typical Hollywood hustle of catch where catch can,' thinking one book a month could give her a steady enough income for her car payment.
Then 'Gone Girl' took off.
Whelan narrated the calculated, cunning Amy Dunne. She knew from the first 10 pages that it would be huge. Amid the rise in digital reading, platforms like Audible ballooned. Whelan still has people tell her that 'Gone Girl' by Gillian Flynn was the first audiobook they listened to.
By then, she was narrating full-time – around 70 books a year – plus writing her first book, 'My Oxford Year.' The quantity was unsustainable and she says she 'almost had a breakdown.' But she was also making a name for herself among both listeners and publishers. When she wrote her second book, 'Thank You For Listening,' she dialed back, but her success didn't. She became known in book communities as an audiobook narrator who intentionally chooses quality books.
As audiobook narrators become public figures, Whelan leads fight for change
Audiobooks were the perfect happy medium for Whelan, who never liked the public recognition that came with acting. Narrating let her continue acting while maintaining the privacy she craved.
Then, about five or six years ago, that changed. Readers started following audiobook narrators like they did their favorite authors or actors. There was a push to be a public figure because her voice helped sell books.
When Whelan went on tour for 'My Oxford Year' in 2018, the stops were filled only with a handful of friends and family members. Then the pandemic hit, and Whelan thought it would be the end of audiobooks because people weren't commuting. She was wrong.
'I started getting messages from people saying things like 'You're the only voice I've heard for weeks now,'' Whelan says. 'It was a very intimate experience for a lot of people and a moment of human connection where we were all so isolated.'
On her 2022 tour, audiobook fans sold out venues for 'Thank You For Listening.'
'That's when I went, 'OK, we're being exploited,'' Whelan says.
Traditional audiobook narrators get paid per finished hour of recording, often a few $100 per hour. Most span from eight to 12 hours. They don't get royalties after, even though others in the publishing industry, like authors and editors, do.
Whelan still gets residuals for Lifetime movies she did when she was 12. But she says she's only ever received $2,500 for 'Gone Girl,' popular as it may be a decade later. Meanwhile, as new players like Spotify, Apple and Amazon enter the space, the audiobook industry reached $2.22 billion in 2024, up 13% over the previous year.
The fight is especially pressing now that artificial intelligence is encroaching on the industry. In May, Melania Trump announced her memoir would be narrated entirely by AI.
'Synthetic voice is just sitting there waiting to take jobs,' Whelan says. 'So we're going to very quickly find ourselves in a situation where there is not enough work and all the work you've done previously is still out there, still making money for people.'
As her platform grew, Whelan realized it was futile to ask big companies 'to do the right thing.' So she started Audiobrary, an audio platform that applies publishing models with royalties to both narrators and authors. And she'll keep talking about it until she sees change on an industry-wide level.
'There comes a point where continuing to just complain about a problem, you are perpetuating a problem if you're not actually fixing it,' Whelan says. 'And this is my attempt to give it a shot and fix it. And jury's out, but I will say that the response I've gotten from listeners and from the industry is just one of massive support.'
Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at [e-mail].