Julia Whelan Launches Audiobrary with Audio-First Romance Casanova LLC
Photo: Kelly Puleio Books Features Audiobooks
Author and prolific audiobook narrator Julia Whelan has a gift for all of her listeners and readers: She’s launching Audiobrary, an audio-first platform for new stories that might not fit into the traditional publishing model. The first project? Casanova LLC, an eight-episode audio romance series that she already teased in her 2022 contemporary romance Thank You for Listening, about the second-chance seduction and true intimacy between a rich widow and a gigolo descended from Giacomo Casanova himself.
Audiobrary will distribute these projects (though they will eventually be available on traditional platforms), which means higher royalties for authors and narrators. Plus, listeners will be able to access special “Rabbit Hole” editions on the site, which include (in the case of Casanova LLC) supplemental interviews with the cast (Sebastian York, Edoardo Ballerini, and Johnathan McClain) and beta readers, plus Whelan performing an in-character interview as TYFL’s fictional author June French.
While Whelan wrote just enough of the series as a foil for her lovelorn audiobook narrators Sewanee and Nick, the author was stymied by the process of writing Casanova LLC as an aural romance that could stand on its own. Not so much the technical aspect, as she has made the project adaptable to both listeners who would prefer either a weekly podcast-style release or the ability to binge all eight episodes at once in a more traditional audiobook format. But emotionally—as she details in the foreword, her first draft leaned into the very trope-y premise, but she had to push past her own fears about (in her husband’s words) making it good, which meant more earnest and as intimate (if not more so) as it is spicy… though she does warn her followers that this is certainly her spiciest work yet.
The word “intimacy” came up a lot in our interview, as Whelan and I discussed how the pandemic surprisingly created the ideal space for an audiobook boom, as well as how Audiobrary is committed to making books by humans, for humans.
The first two Audiobrary projects come from the world of Whelan; in addition to Casanova LLC, she’s also releasing an anthology (available April 24) collecting all of the Victorian poems featured in her 2018 novel My Oxford Year, with commentary for why she chose each. Beyond that, Whelan is currently scouting projects from other creators and hopes to eventually create a submission process down the line.
Paste Magazine: Audiobrary’s About page has a fascinating interview that really gets to the heart of why you’re doing this, contextualized within the looming presence of artificial intelligence within the audiobook space and elsewhere. Can you expand on that here and talk more about the impetus for starting the platform?
Julia Whelan: It started when I was originally conceiving of what I wanted to do next. This goes back to when Thank You For Listening came out and it got a fair amount of attention; people were starting to talk about audiobooks and the industry, and it occurred to me for the first time that it’s a pretty massive medium. There’s such a disconnect, I think, between—I go into my booth, and I record a book, and I do it by myself, and three months later people start listening to it. But I don’t have an immediate feedback situation, or I don’t necessarily know, unless I’m tagged in social media, just what the response is, or how many people are listening. And what coincided was Thank You for Listening came out at the same time that the pandemic—I’m not saying it’s over, but it was sort of winding down, we were going back into public spaces and doing book events, and I was seeing in real life people showing up to these events wanting to see me read, or wanting to talk about this book. And I had noticed that there was a boom, since the pandemic, in audio.
When everything shut down in March of 2020, there was a serious question about, “Is this going to be the end of audio?” Because no one’s commuting anymore, and everyone’s stuck at home. There was, I think, an understanding [that] the success of audiobooks was totally dependent on multitasking, and that people were only listening because that’s how they were getting their reading in—they were able to do it on the train, or in the car—and the opposite happened. People were instead seeing it as an entertainment medium: “I can do a puzzle at night. I’ve spent all day on Zoom and on screens, and I don’t want to watch screens anymore, I just want to have a story in my ears.” And so, surprising pretty much everyone, there was this explosion in 2020 in audiobooks. I wish I could say I’d predicted that or saw it coming; I didn’t, just my book was already in the works, and it came out two years later.
And I saw that there had been a definite spike and a definite jump in the profile of narrators, [when previously] there was a time when people weren’t thinking about who was actually reading this book to you. But that had changed; there were some younger narrators who were coming in and utilizing TikTok in really smart ways, and becoming kind of personas in their own right. And as an author, I’ve also understood that in publishing there are very few points of discoverability for your book outside of you. Blurbs help—you know, putting someone else’s name on your book can help. [laughs] The only other point, really, is in your audiobook narrator. Because you may write a book a year, if you’re going fast, but an audiobook narrator is recording maybe 50 books a year. They’re constantly refreshing that Audible algorithm; and people, when they like a narrator, will follow that narrator and say, “What did they read next?” even if they don’t necessarily know the author or book.
So I was starting to put all of this together, that narrators had a higher profile and were more important to the publishing ecosystem than we were aware of. For years, my gripe with the industry has been that narrators don’t get royalty, that we are paid on a per-finished-hour basis; so not even do we not get royalties, but we’re also only paid on how long the book ends up being, which has nothing to do with how long it takes to record, nor how long it may take to research and prep ahead of time. This never made sense to me for two reasons: One is, I’ve been a Screen Actors Guild member since I was nine years old, and I still get residuals on Lifetime movies I did when I was twelve. I’m also an author in an industry that is based entirely on a royalty structure; and I didn’t understand how narrators who were at the kind of Venn diagram of those two industries were somehow not benefiting from either.
For me, Audiobrary, purely on the business side, is structuring contracts and audio production and audio profits in a way that I feel is fair for authors and for narrators. It’s my attempt to address these problems. Creatively, I think there are many projects that maybe fall into some kind of liminal space between a book and a podcast, or an audio series of some kind, that aren’t necessarily served by the existing distribution channels. So creatively, I’m able to scout projects that maybe a publisher passed on because they just didn’t see a book in it, and they have many more considerations to take into account when deciding whether to acquire a product. For me, I’m saying, would it make good audio? That’s really it. And again as a writer, I know many friends who have something they’ve always wanted to work on but they’ve never thought it was really their audience or their market, or their publisher wouldn’t want it, and that’s not really a consideration of mine. So I also saw an opportunity for some fun creative projects that were not being served anywhere else.
Paste: Do you have or are you in the process of creating a litmus test for a project that would make good audio?
Whelan: A lot of it, again, is narrator-dependent, so to go to the AI question: That was always coming. This was an industry that had one mode of production, and it was not serving the glut of content that could be made, and so this was always something that I could see was going to happen as soon as the technology was passable enough. But to me, I have a… I don’t want to minimize how disruptive it’s going to be to the livelihoods of the people in this industry and how this industry is going to shift; it’s going to be massive. However, I don’t think it’s going to completely eliminate human narration; historically, that’s not the way these things tend to go. One of the examples I use in the About is, when electricity happened, candles didn’t disappear. I have a fundamental belief in the power of human storytelling, the intimacy and emotional connection of human voice—that even if it sounds like a voice, it’s still not real, and it’s very simply because it doesn’t know what it’s saying. But to me, those are just very distinct products. It’s fast food versus a five-star Michelin experience; I want a chef to show me his art.
Paste: You use the word “intimacy” a lot in Casanova thematically. Would you say there’s a sense of connection, that even if this project was recorded in your booth three months ago and I’m listening now, there’s still a connection that’s crossing the divide?
Whelan: Yes! Totally. And something I was not totally aware of—I never thought about the difference—I was an on-camera actor for so many years, and I’d had the experience of, even the difference between film and television actors. This used to be a bigger deal when it was, you were a film actor or you were a television actor; now everyone’s kinda [going back-and-forth]. But the idea at the time was, film actors are larger than life, and people have that kind of remove from them because you see them fifty feet tall; TV actors come into your living room, and there’s a different connection to people like that. That’s always the way I had thought about it and thought about performance.
With audio, what surprised me the most was, I started getting comments from people who would say things like, “I feel like you’re my best friend; I’ve started to read books and I hear your voice when reading.” Especially, again, during the pandemic when people were so isolated, sometimes a narrator’s voice would be the only voice they would hear over the course of a day, the only other human. Like it’s not even an interaction, but the only other brushing-up against a human being that they would have. It reoriented the way that I thought about what we do and—“the service we provide” is a very glib way to say that because it’s bigger than that, it’s so elemental to human-ness. I wrote a line in Thank You for Listening about that, that the human voice is as primal as hearing your mother’s voice still in the womb; it’s so basic, and that’s why I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I just would like to see a world in which it’s actually elevated, and that the people who do it and do it well are compensated for how special it truly is.
Paste: So is Audiobrary setting up a residuals structure?
Whelan: Yep. When I started getting into this, I realized I could just set up an audio publishing company, but if I didn’t create a distribution mechanism, it would just be going into the same distribution ecosystem that cuts everybody’s margins down to nothing. My intention for Audiobrary is that there will be versions of the projects that we do that will be distributed widely, because I don’t want to gatekeep that; I want people to have access to what we’re doing. So it’ll be on Audible and it’ll be in libraries hopefully, and I plan on distributing these editions wide.
But there will be certain editions, or certain expanded versions, that will be exclusive to Audiobrary. [We’re] trying to message to people that if you purchase directly through us, where we’re not having to cut in Audible, the difference, for instance, [for] an author that we partner with, is going to be five or six times greater of every copy sold than if it’s purchased through Audible; and then the narrators will be getting a royalty on top of this. By creating a distribution mechanism, I have more flexibility to pay people more.
Paste: Did you find that your experience of recording Casanova LLC either mimicked Sewanee and Nick in TYFL, or diverged?
Whelan: I had never had the experience of letting anyone else read what I’ve written, first of all. I had narrated my first two books, and I didn’t know how that was going to work; and even though [the other narrators] are men that I have known forever and I love dearly and I trust and I respect and I think they’re insanely talented, I was still [thinking], I don’t know if I can do this. And the answer was, it was amazing and I loved every second of it. There were a couple of moments in the recording process where I was laughing so hard because we found ourselves exactly in moments from Thank You for Listening. The backstory here is that Sebastian York was actually the first colleague that I sent a draft of Thank You for Listening to because I said, “Yeah it’s my world, but it’s mostly your world, and I just want to know if I have spinach in my teeth. Can you tell me if I got anything massively wrong?”
He gave me that first boost of confidence that I needed; he loved it, and he said he felt that it was a very authentic representation of his experiences, even though the character is not in any way based on him—which I feel like now no one is going to believe, I’ve been saying that for two years… but it’s true! So he was very aware of certain parts of that book, and yet still we found ourselves falling into the patterns of Sewanee and Nick while recording. There’s gonna be, in the Rabbit Hole edition, some outtakes in the final episode; there are misreads that are just, if only I had been able to write this for Brock, it was just perfect.
Paste: In Casanova LLC, one of Claire’s requests is to attend an orgy, to explore watching and being watched. Was that a deliberate choice to use such a visual expression of desire for an audio-only project?
Whelan: I always think of my books as books, first and foremost, and the idea of making them audio happens embarrassingly late in my writing process, like it should happen so much sooner than it does. So for me that became for her—and again, so much of this book is framed through the lens of, actually what is it that June wanted to say to Sewanee and Nick? So there is something for Sewanee’s character going back to that, not hiding and not being invisible and not trying to disappear into the woodwork. For Claire, that translated to, for me she is grasping at anything that will make her feel connected to herself again. She misses the fundamental basic human desire to be desired, and she thinks that that’s the thing that’s going to give her that, and it doesn’t.
Paste: I had noted that tension in Casanova LLC, between escaping yourself versus inhabiting yourself.
Whelan: I think that’s a journey that they both are grappling with.
Paste: Right! In TYFL, June is trying to bring Sewanee and Nick together, and the same themes apply: escaping yourself versus being yourself. You mentioned her journey, but it’s mirrored in his as well—who is he when he’s not Brock McKnight?
Whelan: This is why I sent it to Sebastian, first and foremost: The main conflict for Brock is, who are you when you are just this fantasy for women, but you can’t own it. I wasn’t done exploring that yet, and that’s why this book wouldn’t let me go, is… The entire relationship that women have with the fantasy worlds that are created for them, usually—not of their own making, but they engage with it—and how are we even defining male sexuality at this point? We’ve got everything from OnlyFans to an audiobook narrator who is essentially just… we have very different definitions of male sexuality, and I’ve been kind of fascinated with that now for two books.
Paste: This reminds me of the recent Twitter discourse about Jake Johnson as a romantic lead in both New Girl and Minx, where people were sharing GIFs saying that he’s an actor who looks like he knows how to kiss (and they weren’t wrong!). But to your point about women and these worlds being created for them, and then they’re shifting and changing: As you’re exploring this theme in these two projects, are you also looking at how the men’s interactions with the world are changing?
Whelan: I think my priority has been… Honestly, an interesting thing happened with BookTok, where you suddenly have pretty rabid romance fans. Like, there [is] certain discourse that happens there that makes me uncomfortable because I’m like, if this were the opposite, if this were a group of men talking about women this way, we’d all have a problem, as we should. There’s a turn here, and this is where with Alessandro there was so much territory of, how are people perceiving, do they even perceive you—the same way we used to take all of our Marilyn Monroes or our bombshell stars of a certain period but to say, “Just stand there and look pretty, be my fantasy of you, and I don’t want to know who you really are.” And this is a man who has so shut down even asking himself what he wants, because it doesn’t matter to anyone, and that’s the thing that I wanted to explore and play with. Because it felt [like a] very feminized story elementally until recently, when it split.
Paste: Right, like the passage where Alessandro is reflecting on after he’s made Claire come but has elected not to have her reciprocate, and he’s thinking to himself, he either came when he was with guests or he didn’t. I initially heard it as he didn’t, but it was almost sadder, the way that he is just very matter-of-fact about “it doesn’t matter how I feel, it’s just a physical response of, it’s gonna happen or it’s not gonna happen.” It felt very reflective of a lot of women’s sexual experiences, of her own dysfunctional relationship to her own pleasure, like “who can say!”
Whelan: Sebastian had said, when we were recording, “The thing is”—he coined the phrase “intimacy kink” for this, and I think that’s right—he said, “it feels more like erotic fiction that happens to have an HEA,” and I was like, “Yeah, well good luck selling that, it’s romance, man.” I do think that the only reason the entire project was worth doing is because of the psychological explorations of these two characters. When I was fast-drafting it and tried to do the version I thought I was supposed to do, the Kindle Unlimited version of it, it was just like moving Barbies around. I just went, I don’t care enough. I can’t find it sexy if I don’t care, and that’s a problem too.
Paste: There’s so much erotica—and I’m using the term broadly, could be fanfiction, could be erotica—where it’s just part A into slot B and you don’t actually care. People could write the same choreography a million times over for so many different pairings, but if you actually care about what the characters… That’s what I loved about Sewanee and Nick—and I know it was more fade-to-black—but there are moments I remember and have gone back and reread that I haven’t seen in romance novels, that was just so them.
Whelan: I think that’s the feeling. I was actually just having this conversation with Emily Henry—not to name-drop, but because she loved Thank You for Listening—because she was like, “Those scenes could only have happened between those two people.” Like, you can’t take those scenes and put them in any other book, they wouldn’t make sense, and I feel that that’s what I want to feel as a writer… Like, how many orgy scenes have we seen, but I want to see those two people in that scene and see what happens. And you can’t just force them into something where they don’t belong and it doesn’t work.
Paste: It will be interesting to go into the ending with that in mind. But that said, I feel like part of the promotion I’ve seen from you so far has been about the spice level. I got the impression, at least, that you did feel like you had to set people up with some expectation.
Whelan: Yeah, it’s because it’s not Thank You for Listening. I will get tagged in posts side-by-side that are “this made me blush, this was a little too far for me, but if you’re okay with romance you’ll like it” and then I’ll get “I can’t believe you built up all this sexual tension and banter and you didn’t give us the goods.” And I’m like, how can these two interpretations of this book exist in the same universe? And it’s because the book straddles women’s fiction and romance, so people are not expecting this from one of my books. So I feel like I’m trying to hedge; I’m trying to give the poor people who [say] “I don’t like that in my books” a way to opt out of it.
Paste: To your earlier point, there is so much buildup in Casanova LLC about fantasy, there’s dirty talk; even I startled the first time he said “clit.” [laughs] Obviously the spice level is there. But it’s fascinating to see different readers’ terminology—like, “steam” is one of those words that’s hard to parse, the “steamy slow burn” that implies buildup without too much on-the-page sex. It feels like the genre is getting more and more niche, in that people…
Whelan: Because it’s vast. I talk about this in the fake June French interview a little bit where the interviewer’s asking her, “How do you think the genre’s changed since you were writing?” and she’s like, “Um, anal?” [laughs] Every book now ends, especially in genre romance, because they’re fucking so much earlier in the story, like where do you go! That final sex scene, the moment where these people are like, “I trust you, we are gonna be together”—how do you show and not tell that? I guess anal. [laughs] That’s the progression now of these books, and I think that again, time marches on and I love how vast the romance genre is compared to every other category. You can find something for you, and it’s safe experimentation. You test out your own limits in these books; they’re all there, every color of anything you could possibly want is there.
But this is why I would not have traditionally published this book, because it’s setting me up into a lane I’m not going further into. This is not a thing I’m gonna keep doing. I was actually veering, I was gonna step out of romance; my next thing did not have a central love story, so this, to me—the book-within-a-book aspect, the audio-first aspect—it’s giving me the ability to break down the structure of what I am as a writer and just let the book speak for itself and be out there on its own. And every story makes its own rules, and you’ve got to write each one to those rules. For some reason in Thank You for Listening I just did not feel that… it’s weird, maybe, because I was so close to those characters and I knew them, but I wanted to give them privacy? It’s a weird impulse but I was sort of like, “Aw, guys, you should… I’m gonna leave.”
Paste: Claire and Alessandro must each “untangle” their inhibitions/baggage/etcetera. In creating Audiobrary and Casanova LLC, what did you find yourself needing to untangle?
Whelan: I’ve talked about this a little in the foreword, and it wasn’t conscious while I was doing it, but I think after the fact the question of, just, what do you want? There’s a moment [in Casanova] leading up to the ball scene where he says, “You’ve gotta find your voice” and she says, “I know, but that’s really hard.” And she’s like, “How do I do this?” and he says—this was a conversation that’s verbatim from something my husband said to me back when I was in negotiations on a project and I didn’t like the way it was going, and he was like, “Why are you trying to accommodate everyone else? All you want is the only thing that matters.” And I went, “But the world can’t work that way.” And I think that’s the other side of it; it was such a great glimpse into the difference between men and women, typically—he’s just like, What does it matter what they want? I was like, Because literally nothing would work if that’s the way we went through life! But for the purposes of interiority, I think it’s a very clarifying thing to say: why are you doing this; why is it what you want; can you even de-sever what you want from what other people want; is that part of the problem.
And this entire project—Casanova, but also Audiobrary—where I’m at in my life is coming from, what do I want? I’ve been doing things the way other people wanted me to do them for a very long time, and I’ve had a nice amount of success from that, but I also—and I love it; I love my job, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t want it, and I want it to survive… Part of this is coming down to—the world is gonna change, and I would like to know that we’ve built a structure that is sustainable for people to keep doing this. That’s the main goal because I don’t want it to continue the way it is, but I also don’t want to give it away for whatever is coming in the future. I just want to build a different structure, and in this world, I think I can. There are certain things that—publishing in general, a lot; Hollywood, too much—just this little corner of my world, I think I can at least try.
Paste: Among your many talents, you are also a certified tea sommelier. Is there a specific blend that you would recommend for a first-time listen of Casanova LLC?
Whelan: For my last two books I blended a tea for promotion reasons, and they were all tied into something in the drink in the book. For Thank You for Listening, I made a blend that was sort of like a Last Word; it was a key lime black tea with an almond cherry green tea. So in this one, because the mezcal negroni is such a feature—that smokiness—it’s gotta be a lapsang souchong.
Casanova LLC is available now from Audiobrary.
Natalie Zutter is a Brooklyn-based playwright and pop culture critic whose work has appeared on Tor.com, NPR Books, Den of Geek, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @nataliezutter