My Experience with Writer’s Relief

And why I won’t use their service again.

Celie Wells
6 min readNov 23, 2020
Image by DAPA images, via Canva

I fell for a writing scam. It’s embarrassing, and I feel quite stupid.

While I’ve spent more money for the booze tab on a cruise, I still feel the dollars were flushed down the proverbial toilet. I learned an expensive lesson. Hopefully, sharing my experience will help someone else avoid the profound regret I feel today.

For those of you who haven’t used Writer’s Relief, they offer services to help with the agent query process, self-publishing, and author websites. I found them through a web search for the agent query process.

I chose to participate in one round of agent querying for a short YA novel titled Daughters of the Mayflower Universe, a dystopian romance series I’m using as a guinea pig for my journey through the publishing meat grinder.

The premise is simple: you pay a $250 setup fee and an additional $450 after they create a query letter, proof the first fifteen pages of your manuscript and synopsis, and send you up to twenty-nine agent names to query.

I wanted to see if I could find an agent to represent my YA novel and hopefully my paranormal werewolf, demon smut too. Not knowing anything helpful about the agent querying process, I looked at this as a $700 problem. Why not solve…

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