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[Submission Service] Writer's Relief

bkwriter

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Writers relief review

I came across my e-mail writers relief.com and am wondering if anyone has used them before. I guess the deadline was today and tomorrow. You need a Synpisis, qurry, 30 pages. Submite it to the review borad and there help you shape up your submission. Just wondering if anyone has heard about this?
 

bkwriter

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Yiks. Thanks for that article Gill. I got an exdition today. I kept the email but will be deleating it.
 

Anonymissy

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I used Writer's Relief to submit four short stories over the course of a year -- one of which is coming out in a nice literary journal I might never have considered submitting to, but for the people at WR, all of whom were cordial, professional and kind during the year I used them. I realize you can do this yourself, of course, and I can also see how many writers might balk at spending money to have this kind of help. But it turns out that, for me, the year I spent using WR to submit stories was a very useful education in how to go about submitting short stories to literary journals, in terms of the number and frequency of submissions and the sort of journals that might be appropriate for my work. I also learned that there are few harder nuts to crack than the literary journal, but it can be done. Could I have figured all this out on my own in a year? Honestly, I'm not sure I could have done it as quickly -- for one thing, I don't think I would have sent out quite as many submissions and I think I might have missed some good, smaller journals that don't have a big internet presence. I'm also overwhelmed in my life -- I have a demanding job, three kids, and at the time I was also in the middle of editing my first novel. But I love writing stories, and I wanted to get them out there in the world. For me, then, Writer's Relief was helpful. After a year, I felt confident about going it on my own with my short fiction, using duotrope to keep track of my submissions, and my much stronger understanding of the literary journals I could submit to, thanks to working with the people at Writer's Relief. Also, I think my stories have improved a lot -- in part because I got some useful feedback from the many submissions I sent out.

But when it came to finding an agent, I didn't work with Writers Relief. First of all, there seemed to be so much more information online about how to find an agent than there was about short story submissions -- for example, AW was really helpful when it came to figuring out how to write a query letter, and great at describing agents and response times. The letter you enclose with a short story is very businesslike and straightforward -- a query letter is much harder. It seemed to me that this was something I'd be better at getting right than WR, whose strengths are organization, and a knowledge of the market. It turned out that I found an agent relatively quickly, and am really grateful to the great people here at AW for their help with that process.

I'm writing at length in this thread about my experience with WR because during the year I worked with them I grew to really like the people I dealt with. They saw themselves as my advocates, and were very supportive. Yes, they're expensive. But they're not thieves, scammers or schemers. We're all different in terms of how we want to spend our time and money, but for me, this was money I've never regretted spending, although I can certainly see how this might not be the way others would spend their cash.
 

K.B.R.

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What Anonymissy Said...

I'd like to echo what Anonymissy said. My experience was very similar--except in my case, substitute "poetry" for "short stories."

I enlisted the services of Writer's Relief several years ago--and with their assistance, I did get some of my poems published with journals I might never have even considered. I also had (and still have) an extremely busy schedule that didn't allow for the thorough research required for placing poems with just the right publication. (And, yes, it is possible to have the time to write short stories or poems but not to have the time to do the research to find the right markets for your work. Especially with poetry, journals may start up or disappear practically overnight.)

WR was very helpful, but also pretty expensive. I wouldn't use them unless you're a poet or short story writer who has the money to spend and no time to do the research to place your material with the right markets. If you're a novelist searching for an agent or publisher, their methods may not work for you. You're better off doing the bulk of the work on your own, starting here at AW.
 

shelleyo

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They've just made a blog post filled with the same incorrect "rejection stories" that get posted high and low, about Gone with the Wind, Carrie and other novels being rejected 30+ times. I don't know about every factoid on their list, but those two, at least, are total bullshit.

I posted a comment, pointing out that Carrie hadn't been rejected 30 times, prompting King to throw it in the trash before Tabitha fished it out and encouraged him to keep trying. I pointed out that Gone with the Wind had not been rejected 38 times.

I made another post with the link, once I found it, of Mitchell's own letter proving it hadn't been rejected ONCE because she'd never actually submitted.

My post with the link to Mitchell's letter was deleted, and my other is still "under moderation" and not visible, while many other posts have been approved after it.

Writers, or anyone in any part of the profession, should fact-check a bit better than that.

http://www.writersrelief.com/blog/2011/07/famous-author-rejection-letters/

Shelley
 

shelleyo

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That blog post and the comments set my teeth on edge.

After my post, they changed the bit about Stephen King and Margaret Mitchell.

They changed it from saying that King had been rejected 30 times so he threw Carrie away, and Tabitha dug it out of the trash, to saying that he'd been rejected multiple times before Carrie was published.

They changed saying Mitchell was rejected 38 times to saying she'd been rejected over 30 times. Still utter bullshit.

I posted again asking if they even read the link I gave them before deleting it. None of my comments will ever be approved, you can bet. I see these shitty little lists posted everywhere, but this is a professional organization that's doing it, and then not fixing it when the mistakes are pointed out. They should be embarrassed.

Bottom Line: This is the company that wants you to pay them to research markets and submit for you, and they can't even fact-check something as easy to verify as how Mitchell's, King's and others' books got published. How good can their research skills possibly be?


Shelley
 
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shelleyo

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So they are a fresh new shiny egalitarian approach... that suppresses dissent and rewrites history.

To their credit, I got an email saying they never got a link but I could send it again via return email, and that they were looking into it. The list's still up on their site, and my comments are still hidden.

This is the list. Lists like this get posted here and discredited about every month or so:

  1. John Grisham’s first novel was rejected 25 times.
  2. Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen (Chicken Soup for the Soul) received 134 rejections.
  3. Beatrix Potter had so much trouble publishing The Tale of Peter Rabbit, she initially had to self-publish it.
  4. Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) received 121 rejections before it was published and went on to become a best seller.
  5. Gertrude Stein spent 22 years submitting before getting a single poem accepted.
  6. Judy Blume, beloved by children everywhere, received rejections for two straight years.
  7. Madeline L’Engle received 26 rejections before getting A Wrinkle in Time published—which went on to win the Newberry Medal and become one of the best-selling children’s books of all time.
  8. Frank Herbert’s Dune was rejected 20 times before being published and becoming a cult classic.
  9. Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind) was rejected over 30 times before her book was published.
  10. Stephen King received dozens of rejections for Carrie before it was published (and made into a movie!).
Note that 9 and 10 have been changed. #9 originally said 38 times (which they changed to 30, probably after another quick Google search) and #10 said that Carrie had been rejected 30 times so he threw it away, but Tabitha fished it out and told him to try again.

I don't know about #1-#8 as far as accuracy, but I'm doubtful of the numbers. A quick Google search turns up wildly different numbers for all of them. Grisham's is anywhere between 12 and 45. I've seen people claim Gone with the Wind was rejected over 50 times, when it was never rejected.

Bad research.

Shelley
 

Stacia Kane

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What gets me about lists like these are that they're completely unimportant anyway. The implication here is that great or famous writers were rejected because editors just weren't smart enough to see how great they were, but the list doesn't do anything at all to prove that. It doesn't say, for example, that ARE YOU THERE, GOD? IT'S ME, MARGARET was rejected for two years; it says Judy Blume was rejected for two years. But the fact that she later wrote some great books doesn't mean that the rejected books were any good (and even if it had been specifically about AYTG, IMM it wouldn't matter, because for all we know that story was initially about a girl in an asylum having a monologue to god-aliens, and that was the rejected version).

My very first mss ever was rejected wherever I submitted it, because it deserved it; it was frankly awful. I didn't even know how to put dialogue tags after certain types of dialogue, so it was full of lines like:

"I'll never go with you!" She shouted.

(And yeah, the melodramatic and silly nature of that line is indicative of the entire ms, too.)

Most of us have some pretty lousy books hiding somewhere on our hard drives or closets or whatever. The fact that they were rejected isn't a sign that editors are too dumb to recognize talent, but that we hadn't yet worked hard enough to write at a publishable level.

All lists like this prove is that writing is a craft that must be honed, and not many people succeed on their first try.
 

James D. Macdonald

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Beatrix Potter had so much trouble publishing The Tale of Peter Rabbit, she initially had to self-publish it.

Children's books at the time required colored illustrations. Potter submitted a version with black-and-white illustrations, which was rejected. She re-did it with colored illustrations, and was published.




Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) received 121 rejections before it was published and went on to become a best seller.

Robert Pirsig blasted a two-paragraph query to 122 markets, including wildly inappropriate ones (e.g. National Geographic Magazine). He got over 20 expressions of interest, and had an editor and publisher lined up before he wrote the book, or even took the motorcycle trip that the book was based on.



Frank Herbert’s Dune was rejected 20 times before being published and becoming a cult classic.

Dune had already been serialized over the previous two years in Analog magazine. The problem was that no science fiction publisher had presses that would handle so long a book, and no serious publisher would touch science fiction. It was published by Chilton, which had the presses, and didn't care about their reputation.

Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind) was rejected over 30 times before her book was published.

It wasn't rejected even once. For that matter, it wasn't submitted even once.

Stephen King received dozens of rejections for Carrie before it was published (and made into a movie!).

Carrie sold to the very first market King submitted it to.
 

Ulee_Lhea

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The whole "hope and persistence" refrain is annoying too. Getting published is not like playing the lottery -- flogging the same unpublishable work for years and years does not increase one's chances of getting published.

Instead of encouraging people to soldier bravely forward in the face of epic rejection, why not talk about the benefits of writing classes, crit groups and the like?
 

Emptyeye

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Weird that they took out the part of the King fact where Tabitha King fished the manuscript out of the trash and told him to keep at it. If I remember On Writing correctly, that part of the story is true (Although the manuscript was still unfinished at that point).

Anyway, something else that was pointed out the last time this list circulated around is that even if a book gets rejected for years before someone picks it up, there's no guarantee the book that gets picked up was anything like the book that was rejected at the start of its journey--more likely, the author was tweaking the book, making it better per feedback, criticism, etc.
 

shelleyo

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I got another email from them, saying they appreciated the information and were certainly looking into it.

On their site, all the spotty info in that list is still there, save Margaret Mitchell's. The removed that one, but left the rest including how Carrie received DOZENS of rejections before it was published.

They've added an asterisk at the end of the list with the little disclaimer: Some of these facts may vary (to varying extents) across the Internet and scholarly sources. We’ve tried to provide the most accurate info possible.

Considering the list is full of false information, I don't think so. Naturally, my replies to their post are still hidden, and I expect they'll stay that way.

Instead of acknowledging the mistake, they've hidden the fact that anyone pointed out the errors and added a disclaimer at the end. Ethical.

So they ask for money to do market research for you and submit your work. But they're clearly not much into research, given the list they've posted and left up even after learning that it's mostly bullshit.

Those aren't research skills worth paying for.

Shelley
 

Katrina S. Forest

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Weird that they took out the part of the King fact where Tabitha King fished the manuscript out of the trash and told him to keep at it. If I remember On Writing correctly, that part of the story is true (Although the manuscript was still unfinished at that point).

Anyway, something else that was pointed out the last time this list circulated around is that even if a book gets rejected for years before someone picks it up, there's no guarantee the book that gets picked up was anything like the book that was rejected at the start of its journey--more likely, the author was tweaking the book, making it better per feedback, criticism, etc.

That's a very good point.

Everyone says you need determination to get published, but it's not the determination to send the same manuscript out over and over. It's the determination to keep working at the craft of writing until your ms is good enough to publishing.

And quite honestly, if the former is a lot easier. I can send a letter and an SASE with a crying baby on one arm.
 

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They've added an asterisk at the end of the list with the little disclaimer: Some of these facts may vary (to varying extents) across the Internet and scholarly sources. We’ve tried to provide the most accurate info possible.
I noticed they did that right after I posted a comment to the effect that they might want to do their due diligence since they're spreading false information. I got the same email you did, Shelley, and, of course, my comment remains "under review."
So they ask for money to do market research for you and submit your work. But they're clearly not much into research, given the list they've posted and left up even after learning that it's mostly bullshit.
Excellent point. Sadly, where you have hope, you have people willing to believe just about anything. Authors who pay to have others do their work for them are going to have a harder time with their literary careers. I've seen these canned query letters - they're abysmal.

No one can advocate one's work more passionately and effectively than the author. This is nothing more than a shortcut, and there are NO shortcuts in publishing.
 

Katrina S. Forest

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I also feel the need to point out that for the busy parent, instead of paying the cost of Writer's Relief's services, you could use that same money to hire a babysitter and do the research yourself. The money spent is the same, and now you have industry knowledge on top of a list of markets/agents/ect.
 

shelleyo

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I also feel the need to point out that for the busy parent, instead of paying the cost of Writer's Relief's services, you could use that same money to hire a babysitter and do the research yourself. The money spent is the same, and now you have industry knowledge on top of a list of markets/agents/ect.

FTW!

The babysitter works out much cheaper, I think, after a glance at their rates.

Shelley
 

Bicyclefish

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This may be a bit of a tangent, but what is a typical fair rate for proofreading? My question came about from Googling Writer's Relief and learning they paid $2/page -- I don't know if that's for a set number of words per page -- some years back.
 

Old Hack

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My comments on that blog post are also "awaiting moderation" and yes, I got that email too.

It's not good enough, is it?
 

shelleyo

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My comments on that blog post are also "awaiting moderation" and yes, I got that email too.

It's not good enough, is it?

Nope.

The good news is that when a writer Googles them to find information to help them decide whether or not to buy their services, this thread is on the first page.

Shelley
 

Richard White

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Noted they had an article at the HuffPo this week http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/30/new-writer-pitfalls_n_1120730.html

Going to their web site, they're charging $339 to send your poems to 25 agents (Wha. . . agents don't want poetry!) to $399 to send your query to 25 agents for your novel and all points inbetween. Oh, a mere $299 for a resubmission to 25 other agents.

Such a bargain . . . such a bargain. :e2smack:
 
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HapiSofi

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To their credit, I got an email saying they never got a link but I could send it again via return email, and that they were looking into it. The list's still up on their site, and my comments are still hidden.

This is the list. Lists like this get posted here and discredited about every month or so:
4. Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) received 121 rejections before it was published and went on to become a best seller.

9. Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind) was rejected over 30 times before her book was published.
I'm one of the people who've written at length to discredit these lists. Margaret Mitchell was approached by an editor before her book was finished. Robert Pirsig had placed his book with a publisher before he set off on his motorcycle trip.

It's infuriating to see books like Gone with the Wind and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance presented as evidence that editors have no idea what they're doing, when in both cases perceptive editors saw promise in them at a very early stage, and gave them every encouragement.

FWIW, those circulating lists of writers who were supposedly self-published are just as bogus.