November 11, 2011: See You Around, Paul

Paul Chapman joined us in 2000, as assistant in the miniatures department. He's held a lot of jobs since then, working up the ladder. He worked in Shipping for a while; then he ran the casting operation. When we got out of the miniatures business, he closed the casting shop in an orderly way and moved to Building Manager. In that role, he supervised the massive task of getting us moved into our new offices . . . wow, more than five years ago now.

He's also been our Marketing Director since 2004, combining that with constant Other Duties As Required. One reason Paul is effective, in both marketing and Other Duties, is that he knows the hobby so well. He's a dyed-in-the-wool gamer, with a range of interest far beyond our own releases. He just got back from the Essen show, for instance, and he brought back a lot of games. Including one that he's advocating we translate for the English-speaking market . . . More on that as it develops.

But now Paul is moving on. Happily, he's not moving very far. He will stay in Austin as a telecommuting employee of Publishers Services, Inc. -- which is our fulfillment house and our distributor to the book trade. So Paul will still be selling our games, at a different level, and a lot of others as well.

Paul has been invaluable in many ways. The biggest, right now, are at conventions (where he is a tower of strength and sanity in the midst of chaos), and as a writer for this column. He's probably created more than half of the Illuminator entries for the last several years, and I don't just mean announcements of new releases . . . he's good at finding and describing the kind of random weirdness that I love to read myself.

And, with any luck at all, he'll be able to keep on with both these things. PSI is quite willing to second him back to us once in a while, and he wants to keep helping us. So this is not "goodbye," but "congratulations on the career move, Paul, thanks for everything, and see you around!"

-- Steve Jackson