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If you’ve listened to an audiobook in the last 15 or so years, more than likely you’re familiar with Julia Whelan. Or, at the very least, her voice.

After all, best-selling novels from Gillian Flynn, Emily Henry, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Kristen Hannah, Freida McFadden and many more are among the roughly 700 books she’s narrated so far. And nearly two decades later, the former child actor has her routine down to a science.

Despite the lengthy prep process—"it's about four hours of work to one finished hour of audio”—that doesn’t actually factor into the overall package.

“The entire industry runs on finished runtime, so that's how everyone gets paid,” the 41-year-old revealed, later adding, “We talk about volume, but what we really should be talking about is finished hours, because that's the indication of how much work has gone into it.”

So, that can often make for a grueling schedule—in and out of the booth. In fact, at one point, Julia was recording a new audiobook every four days or so. And she kept up that pace while writing her debut novel My Oxford Year.

“Because audio books are notoriously ill paid, I would do 70 books a year to keep my head above water,” Julia, who is joining a slate of her fellow audiobook narrators at the L.A. Times Festival of Books on April 18, explained. “I wrote My Oxford Year under those conditions, almost had a breakdown and said I would not write another book until I had changed my work life.”

As a result, “I slowly started raising my rate and cutting back on the number of books I would do,” she continued, “and that's how that number very quickly gets up to 700.”

That number pales in comparison to come of her peers who’ve crossed over the quadruple digit mark. “There are a lot of narrators who have recorded way more books than I do because they're still doing it at that pace,” the Thank You for Listening author emphasized. “I'm not, I've cut way back.”

After all, trying to balance that narration schedule with her writing and other work ultimately led to a breaking point.  

“I ran myself into the ground, and I had a doctor say, ‘If you don't give yourself a 30-day vocal rest, I can't guarantee you're going to get your voice back,’” Julia recalled. “That was the wake-up call that I needed to start prioritizing my vocal health and also mental health. It's not good to be like locked in that booth for eight hours a day—physically, mentally—in the intensity of telling these stories.”