Over 5 years ago I was asked if I would be interested in creating and selling 3D training material for this company, with a promise of bimonthly royalty payments.
Sure, I eagerly produced some training materials, and sent them to this company to sell. 6 months passed and nothing (even though I was aware on their forum, and also the odd email, that these were selling) - so I emailed and asked about when I would expect the first royalties... The answer was Sorry, wasn't sure how to pay someone outside the USA.
I had Paypal, so we sorted that out - I got payments, but 6 months or more apart over the years, and to get them paid was a real struggle as communication was very difficult and there would often be no replies for 3-5 months to simple queries. As the years went past, this worsened even though I got apologies and promises of better communications...
I asked for copies of my training material from this company so I could have physical packaged products for my personal portfolio. The expense for this was taken from a royalty statement back in 2007, and then never shipped. This was in Jan 2007. I have asked for these over the last 3 years - and each time have had verbatim responses about the products being too heavy and needing to be shipped in smaller packages, and that they would be in the mail this week. When this same excuse comes via email months apart, and almost identical each time, it does raise suspicion.
Around mid-to-end of 2007 payments suddenly stopped - Its now 2011 - in 2010, I had not had any payments for over 2.5 years (nor copies of my products as paid for back in Jan 2007), so I asked this company to remove my products and to finalize what they owed me on 18th May 2010. They sent me a final statement (which didn't align with the last statement from the end of 2007 (2 months missing)) - however after finalizing the amount they claimed to owe, they continued to keep my work for sale on their site and it took 3 months of emailing and asking for them to be removed before they were. I had to post publically on a forum to get any result from this.
I requested that an updated statement be provided to take into account of any additional sales. This has not been done, and has never been sorted. I also noted upon a second viewing that there were some unverifiable expenses being taken away from the amount on the statement by this company (they sell electronically, but also sell physical disks - There was no record of any "download sales" in the statement, and every sale incurred a "disk, label, case, etc" expense - Given many people tend to buy downloadable products, this is something I would have expected to see mentioned on the statement.)
I raised concerns via email that this put into question the accuracy or honesty of all the statements and sales since the beginning - I asked for a serious review of everything.
Eventually, there was a commitment made by this company in an email of a repayment plan of $200 a month to recover outstanding monies as apparently (as was posted publicly on a forum called spinquad.com (owned by this company, and the posts have since been deleted)) there were some financial issues and this company needed to use the money to keep themselves in business. Unfortunately its 4-5 months later - the committed repayment plan has never been followed through. I have sent 11-12 emails over this time, and have had no response back from this company to any of them. I sent invoices via PayPal and found that this company started to reject them, and now they just don't acknowledge them at all.
I would recommend any individual or artist wanting to produce salable training material steer well clear of this company, and consider one of the many other excellent online training businesses. I have heard from other artists that I am not the only person in this predicament, and that there are more people owed monies by this company.
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