Hi everyone, I wanted to let you know that we have a new member of the staff at Amaranthia! I would like to introduce you all to Joe Lieberman (aka TheFool), our newest Amaranthian! Joe will be responsible for getting the games out everywhere, customizing our community, and keeping Amaranthian's up-to-date on what is happening in our little kingdom.



Although many of you don't know Joe yet, I have a neat story to tell you about him! Ahem, let's begin...

Once Upon a Time...



A loooong time ago--okay about five years ago, in a land far away, I made a game called Aveyond. After I made it, I had no idea how to sell it. I put the game on my site, and no one came. I lost hope and figured I would be a technical writer for the rest of my life (yawn).



Then Joe found me. At the time he had just started a sales/marketing business called VGSmart, and he was looking for guinea pigs to test on. For several weeks he hounded me to let him help me. At first, I wan't sure, but eventually, I coughed up $500 dollars and paid Joe to show me how to sell a game.



Immediately, Joe was sending out emails to folks all over the games industry and he introduced me to a new term: Casual Games. Joe gave me a bunch of game sales homework, and before I knew it, I was taking a crash-course in games business.



Joe introduced me to two game portals called ArcadeTown and Reflexive who took Aveyond. When Aveyond launched it did great!



Then, a small, but successful game portal, Big Fish Games (small no longer!), spotted Aveyond, and decided to promote the heck out of it. Before I knew it, Aveyond was everywhere!



Around this time, my game marketing crash-course with Joe was up, and we went our separate ways.



Speed ahead several years, and Amaranthia became a bustling community. Between the community and games, I started working more and more hours. Last year around September, I realized that working from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. was not okay. And, even with those crazy hours, I still wasn't getting everything done that I needed to get done. I disappeared from the community, and most of my industry contacts hadn't heard from me in months.



I realized that I needed to make some major changes to Amaranthia before I went crazy.



Shaz and Bryce came to my rescue. With Shaz taking over development and Bryce taking over technical support, I finally had enough time to step back and look at the company.



I got some good advice from a very cool industry exec, and most notably, I realized that I needed someone to manage business relationships. Joe immediately came to mind, but last I knew, he was employed by someone else. I said "what the heck" and I emailed him anyways. To my surprise, he was free! And he wanted to help! This someone was Joe.



So, five years later, Joe has come back!!! And this time, we've captured him indefinitely.



The End!