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.