The Living at 50 Series Got a Glow Up — But These Books Were Always Bigger Than Covers

Before AQ-Books became a publishing company…

Before the imprints.

Before the orange hoodies.

Before Roxi became self appointed Head of Creative Chaos and Xena became Director of Judgment…

There was frustration.

A lot of it.

Long before the Living at 50 series existed, books like Unmasked, The Terrazza Diaries, Zach, Not Kelly, Hung Up, and Hung Up 2: Wrecked and Married  were published under a traditional “big box” publishing structure.

And listen — we learned a lot.

We learned how the industry works.

We learned how books get positioned.

We learned how queer stories are often softened, reshaped, sanitized, or packaged to feel “safe.”We learned how branding meetings can slowly suck the soul out of something weird and honest and alive.

Most importantly?

We learned what didn’t feel like us.

There’s a strange pressure inside traditional publishing to become digestible. To smooth edges. To make stories more marketable, more explainable, more comfortable for everybody else.

AQ was never built to be comfortable.

Eventually, we hit a point where the creative compromise stopped feeling strategic and started feeling personal. So instead of quietly complaining about it…

We got pissed off.

And the result was the Living at 50 series.

These four books became the first fully independent releases under August Quinn and what would eventually evolve into AQ-Books. They weren’t just books — they were a shot across the bow. A declaration that we were done asking permission to tell stories the way we actually wanted to tell them.

Messy.

Sharp.

Queer.

Funny.

Unfiltered.

Midlife.

Emotional.

A little feral.

Deeply human.

The series was born during COVID, during reinvention, during grief, during identity shifts, during the kind of silence that forces you to either confront yourself or completely disappear into distraction.

Instead, we wrote.

And what came out wasn’t polished corporate storytelling.

It was honesty with a pulse.

Over time, these books evolved alongside the company itself. Some were rewritten. Expanded. Rebranded. Tightened. Sharpened. The voice became more confident because we became more confident.

Now, with the complete redesign rollout, the Living at 50 series finally visually reflects what it always represented creatively: unapologetic storytelling without corporate permission slips attached.

And fittingly, the series has officially moved under the Alpha Wisdom by AQ imprint.

That feels right.

Because Alpha Wisdom by AQ was built specifically for stories about reinvention, identity, healing loudly, queer adulthood, emotional survival, and learning how to become yourself after life already told you who you were supposed to be.

These books were the blueprint for that imprint before the imprint even existed.

The glow up isn’t just cosmetic.

It’s symbolic.

These books mark the exact moment AQ stopped trying to fit inside somebody else’s publishing model and started building its own.

And honestly?

That changed everything.

— August Quinn

🐾 Roxi says the rebrand was her idea.

🐺 Xena would like everyone to stop using the phrase “shot across the bow” because she takes maritime metaphors very seriously.