ACX University Interview (2020)

Behind the Scenes of Lustily Ever After: The Audiobook Musical

In 2020, the lovely people at ACX University invited us to come talk about Lustily Ever After, on their YouTube series, and we said yes before they could finish the sentence.

ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange) is the all-in-one marketplace where writers, narrators, and publishers connect to create and distribute audiobooks. Their ACX University series spotlights creative projects and industry insights from people doing interesting things in audio storytelling. We like to think we qualify.

Host Emily Curran sat down with several members of the Lustily creative team to dig into how the whole thing came together — the inspiration, the chaos, the creative risks, and the very specific kind of ambition that makes someone decide a fully produced audiobook musical parody is a completely reasonable project to take on. Joining the conversation were collaborators Miranda Ray, Henry Kaiser, Carolyn Jania, and Aaron Wilson, who collectively brought narration, acting, writing, and musical improv into the mix and somehow made it all cohere into something wonderful.

As for how it started: after years of narrating romance novels and performing musical improv, it turns out the only logical next step is to combine them into something that had never quite existed before. The tropes were right there. The songs basically wrote themselves. The rest is audio history.

We're grateful to ACX for having us, and you can watch the full episode below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPYMqVDLIR0