1. What are the features of Accurance’s Book Cover Design service?

There are features of the book cover creation which Accurance prides itself on, including:

• Customization of all book cover project (which includes front cover, spine, and the back cover) to reflect the content and the author’s ideas of his/her cover
• Use of non-copyrighted images, so the client can fully own the book cover art
• Provision of three revisions for no additional fee. Starting over with a new concept, however, is a separate cost item and is not covered in the three revision cycles

1. What are the scope and limitations of the company’s illustration service?

Accurance provides full color or black and white original illustrations for both the cover (front and back) and the interior of various books, such as:

• Children’s books
• Serious-themed stories
• Stylish books/modern romance books

• Dark-toned horror books
• Science oriented books

Sizes of all illustrations depend on the interior size or book-cover dimensions. Our output may be in a JPEG or PDF format, depending on what the client requires. Accurance limits its Illustration service to graphic arts only. We do not create 3D artworks, traditional paintings, and animated/moving/Flash-based illustrations.

1. How does the Mechanical Editing service of Accurance differ from other editing services offered worldwide?

Good mechanical editing typically adds $600 to $1,500 to the cost of publishing a book—quickly moving the cost of prepress production into the stratosphere. It’s too much. Our Mechanical Editing service is quite sophisticated—and $450 is a more typical cost.

Moreover, our editors are experts of the Chicago Manual of Style guidelines and perform detailed and comprehensive copyediting to check the manuscript’s structural continuity and accuracy. Summarized below are 18 categories of editing which our editors follow:

a. Correcting spelling errors:

• Basic spelling errors
• Errors involving similar spelling or sound alike:

• “there,” “their,” and “they’re”
• “affect” and “effect”
• “two,” “too,”
• “it’s” and “its”

• Errors in both singular and plural possessives

b. Punctuation errors:

• Hyphenations
• Commas
• Semicolons
• Colons
• En dashes and em dashes
• Quotation marks
• Apostrophes

c. Grammar errors:

• Subject and verb usage
• Tense problems
• Plural and singular problems
• Basic word, sentence, and paragraph syntax
• Run-on sentences and sentence fragments

d. Changes in word choice

• Overused words
• Clearer word choices
• Pointing out offensive words

1. What are the key features of the Page Design that sets this service apart from other providers?

For over a decade, Accurance utilizes the most efficient and cost-effective page design processes in the industry. Our service is geared to combine:

• Extremely disciplined rule sets for consistency, error-checking, and accuracy of specifications per book;
• Best practices at each step of formatting to decrease time consumption, the revision drafts necessary, and the number of problems that needed immediate attention;
• Highest level of problem resolution and file management, with each issue, concern, and decisive action—plus the project tracking—collected in one folder for easier data access, communication, and review.

Moreover, our formatters follow standard formatting guidelines, but they can also provide custom page design, as per client request. They are experts of various page layout softwares, which include Adobe Creative Suite (CS), MS Word, Quark Xpress, and Scribus, often collaborating to meet the high demands of every project.

1. What are the areas covered by the High-Level Manuscript Review (HLMR) service?

Our HLMR service is designed to spot serious/minor mistakes before the manuscript is submitted to editor/publisher. To ensure thorough review, the service is divided into four major sections:

• Manuscript Review – contains a brief summary of the manuscript.
• Mechanical Editing Analysis – includes a thorough assessment of the manuscript’s structure (grammar, spelling, punctuation marks, sentence structure, etc.)
• Substantive Analysis – contains the evaluation of the context, focusing on elements significant to the story, such as setting, plot, characters, dialogue, and resolution.
• Summary – provides overall assessment of the manuscript as well as recommendations.

1. What type of publishers do Accurance serve?

Accurance serves any type of publishers who choose to outsource their in-house book production services. We cater to traditional publishers, POD publishers, and everything in between.