The Accurance Group
Complaint 318354 Details

I just filed the following complaint about accurance.com with the Better Business Bureau of Indianapolis, Indiana:

I am hereby filing a complaint about Accurance.com trying to defraud me of $448 which they owe me. I am also holding them responsible for any future damages which they may cause me by maliciously interfering with the publication of my ebook "Solomon's Sky".

Your website's search engine does not know Accurance.com but the CEO profile on that company's "About Us" page links the founding of Accurance to the "explosive growth" of its sister company and first client Author House, a notorious subject of consumer complaints and scam alerts. Author House is one of the 16 companies your site mentions as alternate names for "Author Solutions" in its list of 355 complaints about that group received in the last 36 months. This dismal record of an average ten complaints per month contrasts with Accurance's self-description on its website under "Value Proposition" where it claims "It is uncommonly rare that a publisher and an author we work with are unhappy with our service."

I paid Accurance on 3/21/2011 $299 for their formatting my htm manuscript "Solomon's Sky" as an epub file for all the common ebook readers plus as a mobi file for the Kindle and as a pdf file suitable for printing as a paperback by CreateSpace. I also paid them on that same date $199 for their setting up the retail pages for my book at all the major online booksellers, and I received from them a week later a $50 refund as their promised rebate for that combined purchase. This left $448 open for the three formatting tasks and the retail setups.

I also paid them on 9/21/2012 a separate amount of $129 for organizing all my endnotes into numerical order and linking them to the corresponding numbers in the text. Accurance mostly completed the endnote job, except for five notes that they left out of order. I corrected these myself and told them that they had earned the $129.

Their work on the epub file got delayed because I was reworking my manuscript, but when they submitted their file to me on 11/20/2013, I had to request many changes in the formatting, above all the corrections of two major errors:

1.) In the Adobe Digital Reader 2.0 used in portrait mode with medium font size, the starting quote marks of any quoted item at the end of a line were left on that line but the item quoted was separated from them and appeared only on the next line.

2.) In the Sony Reader, also used in portrait mode, the right and left sides of all full-width images and of their integrated captions were cut off, displaying only truncated images and caption text.

I told Bill Earle, my contact at Accurance, that this was unacceptable, but he refused to acknowledge that these defects were a problem. I told him that a moderator at the Adobe Digital forum had suggested the quote mark problem could be avoided with a style sheet, and I even conveyed to him the line of code that moderator had given me to keep the quote marks with the items quoted.

Also, when I converted the epub file into a Word document to ready it for a proper re-formatting, I found that Accurance had fixed the width of those images to 5.21 inches, as opposed to the Lulu formatting specification for epub that images should not exceed a width of 5.0 inches.

Both these major defects in the Accurance epub file would have been easy to correct if the Accurance team had any formatting knowledge, but Bill Earle wrote to me instead on 1/15/2014 that

"my team does not believe that we can achieve that here to your satisfaction, so I have asked them to reportback to me in no more than a week on the monies you have expended and on the costs we have incurred, and I am happy to refund what I can and let you have the most recent output for approval or changes if even possible, somewhere else. And that is not something I have written in almost a decade of customer support."

I replied on 1/21/2014 that "If your team can fix that separation of quote marks this way, then I would appreciate your trying that. If you don't want to get involved with such style sheets to obtain a more correct display then I accept your proposal to end our relationship and to refund me the unearned portions of what I paid you.

(...) you have earned the $129.00 that I paid you for the numerical ordering of those endnotes. As to the other payments of $299 for the formatting and and $199 for establishing the retail sites, less the $50 discount you returned to me, your team did not earn these $448 because they have not delivered a commercially acceptable epub file to me."

That same day, Bill Earle replied "I will meet again with my supervisors on the eTeam about your email and what we can do. I believe there may be some costs associated with the $448 balance that have been done in good faith, but before I go there I need to know exactly what has been done and what we can do. "Good faith is what I always want you to expect from us!"

I answered on 2/3/2014: "Thank you, Bill, for your "good faith" message. Indeed, that is what I am expecting from you, including the recognition that it does not matter what expenses your team has incurred in preparing my manuscript file for commercial distribution in the epub format. It is only relevant to what degree they have lived up to your promise of delivering a commercially acceptable product. I don't doubt that they have put effort into the work they presented, but I trust that you will also recognize in good faith that their result is simply not up to the standards applicable to ebooks that can be sold to paying customers.

Here is what you promise on your website about ebook conversions:

"Our ebooks are compatible with the latest cutting-edge standards of this fast-changing technology. All our output is ran against a multiple-testing software and loaded into multiple ebook reader devices before we allow them to be put into the market or given to our clients.

Our ebooks load with near-zero errors or problems on all versions of Apple’s iPads and iPhones, Amazon’s Kindles, Sony’s eReaders, Barnes and Noble’s Nooks, Kobo’s eReaders, MobiPockets, virtually all pads, as well as Adobe’s and other providers’ eReader emulators for PCs, Macs, and more."

This "near-zero errors or problems" promise is simply not true for the epub file your team supplied to me. I would therefore appreciate it if you could send to me asap (...) the $448 which I paid for your team's producing acceptable files in the epub and Kindle and other ebook formats as well as the printable paperback pdf format and for your establishing the retail sales pages for these versions at the various vendors of such books."

Bill Earle replied on 2/26/2014: " ... because we know full well that the eBook output we have already produced is of high quality and would be fully accepted for worldwide distribution by our EDAPT partner, and that our output could now be taken and distributed by you as is, I am authorized to offer you a 50% refund of the $448, or $224, to cover the costs we have endured in producing what now is a perfectly fine ePub file that you can use. You will be able to distribute what you have at your discretion.

Or, I am authorized to offer a 100% refund on the $448, but you will not have the right to distribute the work we have produced and you have not paid for, and can then seek other sources for your production now and in the future.

I have never had to offer this type of a refund and wish in my heart that we could satisfy you as we have done every one of thousands of authors who have used and continue to use our services. But, you seem beyond that, so it is best that you choose an above option and I will begin the processing."

I accepted this offer of a refund on 2/28/2014 by writing: "I accept your offer to reimburse me the $448 I paid you for producing the epub and Kindle and CreateSpace files and for establishing the retail sales pages for my book. I will not use the ePub file you provided. I have already converted it back to html and will soon make it into a Word file so that I can change the sequence of endnotes and make the many other corrections required, and then reconvert it either myself or through a professional formatting contractor into a new epub file that includes nothing from your conversion or other work except for the partial re-ordering of the endnotes you supplied and for which I paid you.

You can either mail me a paper check or preferably send me the money to my PayPal account for which I use the email address listed below."

However, despite Bill Earle's "good faith" assertion that he had been authorized to issue the refund, he sent me on 3/3/2014 this email: "Contrary to what you believe, I must pass everything of this type through the President of my company. It is part of our operating procedures. You have been offered and have accepted the full refund and that refund comes out of our corporate office ...not from me. If they would like a document signed by you as part of the process it is not something that would come from me. I am not backtracking, as you put it, on anything. I assure you, the refund will be processed as quickly as I can get it to you."

On March 21, he then sent me a "release form" to sign that said "I, Peter Aleff, the author of Solomon’s Sky: The Religious Board Game on the Phaistos Disk hereby agree that I have not used in the past and shall not use in the future, any part of the eBook file output of this title, which was created solely by International Content Management, Incorporated d/b/a Accurance d/b/a Publish Wholesale (hereinafter ‘ICM’), for distribution or sales to retailers, distributors, end-users, or eBook outlets. I understand that I have no ownership of this file and that it would be a copyright violation to use it. I understand that custom coding built into the ICM output is proprietary, has not been purchased by me, and that any distribution of the files created by ICM will result in recovery of maximum damages. I understand that ICM will monitor the retail market for this embedded coding that identifies the output and has already alerted distributors."

I informed Bill Earle on 4/11/2014 that: "my legal adviser tells me that the release you want me to sign is over-reaching because it lets you threaten to stop me from publishing my book in any epub version. You did not specify which coding is yours, so you can always claim maliciously that I am transgressing. Even if someone recodes the entire thing from scratch some segments of code are bound to be similar to what your team supplied because there are not many different ways of converting Word files into epub.

I am therefore sending you via wetransfer.com my latest version that I reconverted into a Word file and then modified with at least a couple hundred tweaks and minor corrections so it is easy to distinguish it from your latest file. Please tell me if my Word file still contains any of your conversion coding, and if it does not, retract your threat to attack my future epub version of that file. Or else I will have to hold you liable for any delays and other damages that might result from your obstruction against my publishing this book.

I also want to bring to your attention that you are trying to hold the entire $448 hostage although the work you claim to be your property relates only to the epub conversion which was only a small part of the $299 amount that also included your Kindle conversion as well as the CreateSpace file preparation, whereas the other amount was for your preparing the retail sales pages which have nothing to do with that epub dispute but for which I paid you already in full.

Please remember that you are the one who said that you did not want to continue to work on my project, so if you were honest you would realize that this obliges you to refund me the amounts you did not earn. You would not try this evasion and your grossly overreaching threats against my publishing the book. You had already told me that you were authorized to issue the refund and then only later came up with that ridiculous release as your way to avoid paying what you owe me.

I am therefore asking you to now pay me my refund of $448 without further delay. If you don't, I will hold you responsible not only for the $448 but also for any legal expenses your attempts to evade your obligation may cause me."

Accurance downloaded my Word file on 4/12/2014, but I have not received any comment from them on whether it contained any of their code, nor have I received the refund of $448 I requested for work paid but not done. In addition, their notification of unnamed distributors could interfere with the distribution of my ebook even though it will be reformatted from scratch without any input from Accurance. Moreover, that notification of third-party vendors violates the assertion of Accurance on their website: "Accurance’s relationship and services with all our publisher clients is strictly confidential. Our clients’ author customers would never know that their work is being done by Accurance."

I am therefore asking you for your help in obtaining this refund, and also in having them retract their dishonest notification to ebook distributors to not handle my upcoming book because Accurance claims maliciously and in bad faith that it might contain material copyrighted by them.

Thank you in advance for your help in keeping Accurance from defrauding me and damaging my reputation.