Kevin Johns: All right, Ellen and Terence, welcome to the Writing Coach Podcast.

Ellen: Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.

Kevin Johns: Well, Ellen, I invited you to be on the show. You and I had crossed paths a bit, and you instantly said, “Kevin, I’d be happy to join you, but I’ve got to bring my client Terence with me.” So right off the top, I’m really interested to hear: why were you so insistent on bringing your great client with you for the interview?

Ellen: Well, for one thing, I think our relationship is a great example of how fruitful a coach–writer relationship can be. We’ve worked together for five years now. And the other thing is that Terence’s book entered the world just a week before the day we’re recording this, so it’s very timely. We’ve been doing a number of interviews, and when your invitation came, I thought, well, this is a natural fit.

Kevin Johns: Well, congratulations, Terence, on the release of your book. Mere days out of the gate here — how are you feeling?

Terence: I’m feeling pretty incredible. We went through a very linear, sort of traditional process, and then at the last minute, my agent effectively said, “I think we’re going to miss the window based on the marketplace. I would advise you to self-publish.” So, in a turn of events, we’re getting this out into the world on our own, and I’m really glad it’s happened that way.

Kevin Johns: Fascinating. I know, Ellen, you’re a successful traditionally published author, and Terence, I know you built a huge audience on TikTok. So I’d assumed the plan had always been for you to self-publish, because the audience was already built. But it sounds like that wasn’t originally the plan. Fill me in a little more on the backstory of how you came to ultimately put the book out yourself.

Terence: I started writing it in 2022. I believe we were ready to take it to agents in ’24, and that took over a year of querying. Then, once I got my agent, we went on submission for about a year. And it was sort of like this: everyone kept saying, “This is meant to be in the world.” There were many editors who wanted it, but it kept dying in acquisitions. And my agent said, “If there’s anybody who can do this, you can do it.” So it was really her advice, and I take the advice of smarter people very close to heart. I thought, if she thinks I can do it, I’m going to do it.

Kevin Johns: Well, what brought the two of you together in the first place?

Terence: I decided, with no business doing so, that I was going to write a book. That came off the viral success of one TikTok series that was kind of Christmas-fantasy related. So I typed this thing on my phone — basically the entire manuscript — and thought, “I think I need an editor. I feel like that’s something I require.” So I sent out some editorial queries, effectively for an edit letter, and Ellen’s came back. I was sort of enamored with her, and I knew immediately: I need her to teach me everything. I was very transparent about that. I said, “This is going to be a long relationship, so if you’re up for it…” And she said yes.

Ellen: Yes. And from my side, I was really excited to get Terence’s request for editing, because I saw in him an ability to understand story and scene and dialogue and character and drama in a way that’s extremely unusual in the beginning writers I see. I knew it would be a lot of work, but I was really excited to work with him and translate his vision and his imagination into a finished book.

So we started off — he had written a long manuscript, about 80,000 words, and the first version was kind of like one paragraph, with no chapter breaks. You can speak to this better, Terence, but I think you saw things in your mind, and you didn’t see them on the page the way I tend to see words and stories on the page. So in that way, we came together and were able to bring this story out and onto the page.

Kevin Johns: Terence, you mentioned that the idea to write in the first place came from your success on social media. I’m not very experienced on TikTok, so when I hear TikTok, I think of dance videos. I know there’s a big book community on TikTok reviewing books and whatnot, but the idea of using TikTok as a storytelling platform to begin with — where did that come from?

Terence: I have a fine arts background, but I’ve worked in commercial film production, so I’m very cinematic in the way I see things. I tested types of content, and then I started this storytelling series — very emotional, at Christmastime — and it just blew up. So I thought, “Oh, there’s an appetite for longer-form storytelling content.” And then in the comments, it was, “This has to be a book. This has to be a book.” And I thought, “Can I do that? Yeah, why not? I’ll give it a go.”

Kevin Johns: Ellen, I know that in your marketing you tend to focus on working with middle-aged women’s fiction authors. Terence, I don’t think you’re a middle-aged woman writing women’s fiction.

Terence: This is actually the beauty of this, and I’ll tell you why. When I started writing this, my female main characters were 18- and 19-year-old women, and I’m obsessed with historical fiction. So there’s a huge backbone of the value of being accurate to the time period and to the way people behaved, and I was specifically looking for someone in historical fiction.

And the reason I really knew it was Ellen: I read the first ten pages or so of Keeping the House, her first book, and there’s a carriage scene, I think on page seven. The way she wrote the point of view of this young woman in the carriage — how she was internalizing it, with this very theatrical description of the landscape — I thought, “This is the perspective I need.”

Kevin Johns: Ellen, that must be so satisfying to hear — that it wasn’t necessarily your marketing angle that attracted Terence to you, but your writing itself. How great does that feel?

Ellen: Oh, that’s always great to hear. And I will say, back when Terence and I started working together, my marketing was quite different. I was targeting writers of historical fiction more, so I think that’s really where we connected. But to know that he took the time to read my work — my first novel, Keeping the House, was published by Random House in 2007 — he dug up a copy, found that carriage scene, sent me a screenshot and said, “This is it.” And we joke, over the course of working on this book that he has now published, Alice of Oz, that we love our carriage scenes. There are so many carriage scenes in Alice. So I think we connected on so many levels in that way.

Terence: I love anything that’s moving during a scene. I just love it.

Kevin Johns: Okay, tell me more about that. I’m very interested in the mechanics, the nuts and bolts of fiction and of writing. So what is it about movement in scenes that attracts you, Terence?

Terence: I think it’s very much my background in acting, where movement and action are the best way to stay out of false dialogue. When you’re really considerate about the environment, and the characters moving through that environment, the scene tends to move with the same momentum — at least structurally, that’s what I felt. So there’s a lot of movement in Oz. I think there’s only one scene where we’re sitting still.

Ellen: Yes, I think that’s true. And for me, the idea of movement is so important too. I remember one of the early comments I got from one of my early agents was, “You have too much stage direction in this scene — in all of your scenes.” So the key is to have the movement in your mind without actually spelling out every single detail of it. I tend to see the scenes in my mind, and then I write down the words that reflect what’s happening as I’m seeing it, so you get a lot of “And then she crossed over to here.”

Terence, I know you’re very visual too when you’re writing, so again, I think we connected on that. But we also worked on getting the right level of description and action, mixed with dialogue, mixed with character development, mixed with showing, not telling. We worked hard to get the lines and the scenes just right, so that you don’t realize you’re in the hands of someone who’s figured all of that out. You’re just so lost in the narrative that you’re flipping the pages to find out what happens. That’s what we worked on a lot.

Kevin Johns: We’re celebrating Terence’s release of Alice of Oz this week, but Ellen, you also had a book released this year, did you not? And another one coming?

Ellen: And another one coming, yes. In June, I published Summerland Cove — I’ll hold it up for people watching on video. It was published by Mariner, an imprint of HarperCollins, and it’s my fourth novel. It’s a family saga set on the coast of Maine: drama with a summer cottage and a missing husband, lots of emotion, and lots of family secrets that come out. And I just finished a draft of my next one, which will be out in 2028. I sent that off to my editor a couple of weeks ago, so it has been a busy time and a very exciting one. Lots to celebrate.

Kevin Johns: Yes — congratulations to both of you. What an amazing last few months it’s been for you both.

Terence: Thank you.

Kevin Johns: Ellen, a lot of the writing coaches I have on the show, and the writing coaches I work with or talk with, are always trying to find a balance between supporting their clients to the utter best of their ability and working on their own writing. How did you find that balance? It sounds like you’ve gotten a couple of books written while also supporting Terence — and, one assumes, other clients — on their writing journeys.

Ellen: Yes. “I work all the time” is kind of the answer to that, but I love it. I work only with Terence at this time. I’ve worked with lots of clients in the past, but as my own schedule and my publication schedule have ramped up, I’ve stopped taking on new clients for now. We’ll see in the future whether I continue that.

Terence: We were able to build it in. I’d say, “Okay, so you’ve got a writing sprint here, so I’ll get you my next manuscript by the day you deliver yours.” We were just rolling through each other’s schedules.

Ellen: Every time. Every time I would send something off, there would be an email from Terence: “Here’s my latest work.” So every time I wasn’t working on my own stuff, I’d be working on his manuscript. And we also ended up writing a screenplay together, which was really fun.

Terence: We did. That was a lot of fun.

Kevin Johns: Okay, we’re definitely going to come back to that. But while we’re talking about process: Terence referred earlier in the conversation to a more traditional editorial approach to working together. Can you lay out for the listeners what that actually looked like?

Ellen: We started off with a real back-and-forth. Again, the first manuscript he sent me was quite rough, but very appealing visually and in terms of storytelling. So I just dove in and really got in there with —

Terence: Ripped it apart.

Ellen: I did. I’m not an easy editor. Terence can tell you, I have really high expectations.

Terence: She demands excellence. And that’s an amazing thing, because it means she believes you’ve got it in you.

Ellen: Yes, and I always believed that about Terence. So I would write all the comments in the margins — it would be four or five comments per page and 20 line edits per page — just trying to show how each line could better communicate what he was trying to communicate.

As he mentioned, we were working on the first book, which was called Once Upon a Winter Tide. Then he was getting all these comments on TikTok about the Oz storytelling he was doing there, and all these agents were saying, “Write the book about Oz.” So we said, “Okay, let’s try that.” He sat down, wrote a first draft of that and turned it in, and I was so impressed. He had learned what I’d taught him about polishing, and he turned in something that was completely ready for a deep developmental edit. It wasn’t so much about “This is how you do this” anymore. He had learned all that.

So we got into really deep developmental story editing, and then back and forth, back and forth, changing the ending — over the course of a couple of years. As we said, every time I turned in a manuscript, I’d get his, and we’d work through it again. We lost count of how many times it went back and forth. I know there was a whole ending he wrote that was about 150 pages, and I said, “I think this is your next book. I don’t think this is this book.” So then he wrote a new ending. We did all of that.

Terence: It was something like seven rounds of developmental edits — true developmental edits, where the story structure changed pretty substantially each time. And Ellen is meticulous, so we went through, I don’t know, 12 proofing and line-editing passes.

Ellen: Yeah. And throughout that process, we really became friends. We had conversations about things like: What does it mean to make art? Why are we doing this? It’s so hard — why does it matter so much? We would keep each other going, him through my process and me through his, and those were some of the most valuable conversations we had. So I think the coach–client relationship kind of morphed into a friendship. But we both respect each other’s talent so much, and that’s what makes it work.

Kevin Johns: So you started together on the Christmas story, then this pivot happened, and then you did seven drafts of Alice. Terence, for the writers listening who are maybe on draft two and thinking, “I’m so sick of this story,” or “I’m going to get it perfect this time” — what advice would you have for them about the revision process, and about being willing to pivot or do seven drafts?

Terence: I think the real story happens in the edit process. I always say this: I’m not precious with the work, because I know I’m going to have to change it and keep changing it. And I’ll say that every time I thought it was perfect, either Ellen or even my agent had a suggestion that totally transformed the book. It always got better. It never does anything but get better. So the thing I’d say to anyone is: if you’re willing to just relentlessly go over the same thing, you can get to the end of this.

Kevin Johns: Ellen, I know you’ve demonstrated perseverance too. I’ve heard you talk about landing your agent originally, and that you faced a lot of obstacles along the way. Do you have any thoughts for the folks out there who might be in the query trenches — on rejection 50 or whatnot — and how you went about sticking with it?

Ellen: Well, I’ve been through querying agents a couple of times. Once was very early in my career, back before there was email, almost — we were doing it by envelope, with self-addressed stamped envelopes and whatever.

But more recently, I had fallen into a drought in my own publication history. I’d gone about ten years without a book, and it came time to change agents. So I set about querying. I upped my knowledge of what’s current, because it had been such a long time since I’d done it, and realized that things move a lot faster than they used to — everybody’s querying by email and using QueryTracker. So I started doing that, and I told myself, “I’m going to have to send 100 queries.” I hoped I wouldn’t have to, but I told myself that because I thought it would make it easier. Every rejection then brings you closer to success. It’s not just another rejection. It’s, “Oh, good — two out of 100 have rejected me,” or “25 out of 100 have rejected me, and when I get to the hundredth one, it will work out.”

As it happened, I queried 75, and I had kind of run out of people I thought were good matches for me, and I was really almost ready to give up. I didn’t want to. I had written this book, The Hidden Life of Cecily Larson, which I really loved and really believed in, and it was puzzling to me why people didn’t love it as much as I did — as we all probably feel. But I still kept going, and the 75th one said yes. Then very quickly, she sold the book to Mariner at HarperCollins. It became an Indie Next pick. It was a People Best New Book. It was a top pick on Goodreads and BookBub and all over the place.

So I was on the verge of giving up, to be honest. But if you don’t try, you will not make it. Trying is the only way to find out if you’re going to have the luck. And sometimes it is just luck. Sometimes it’s the market.

In Terence’s case, I believe in this book so strongly, and that’s one of the reasons why I think he pursued traditional publication — you can correct me if I’m wrong. I kept telling him, “Your book deserves a wide audience, and I want you to have the best distribution possible behind it.” That’s the real challenge for indie authors, as I understand it. I’m learning more from Terence about how this is done; I don’t know that much about it myself. But I really wanted him to have that machine behind him, because I believed in his book so much. So he went through that whole process of 100-plus queries and getting an agent. And she believed in the book, and she loved the book. This is a top, top agent, and she was so excited to sell it. She thought she’d sell it, like, tomorrow.

Terence: She thought it was going to be done in a week.

Ellen: Yeah. And then it was a year, and as Terence said, it kept dying on the acquisitions table because the teams couldn’t agree. We just don’t know, in this publishing business. I have a book I worked on for ten years, which I hope may be published someday, but it wasn’t the right time for it then.

So I always tell people: if you want to write, write. Don’t do it for any reason other than that, because it’s not an easy path to financial success. It’s not an easy path to fame. It’s not an easy path to anything. And once you have a book published, all you do is start all over again, trying to do it again.

But there’s the satisfaction. That’s why Terence and I had those conversations throughout our work together, because you do have those questions: What am I doing? Why am I doing this? And the only answer can be that it comes from the fire within your soul that says, “I need to do this,” whether or not I succeed in what people might call the traditional sense. It’s the creative fire that every artist has, whatever their medium. And I think we can lose sight of that in our culture, because everything’s about instant likes and instant gratification and how big an audience you have. Those are measures of success, and we lose sight of the human need to create, which is so vital to why we exist.

So that’s a long answer to your question of how you deal with rejection. You have to assess where your passions are, and what price you’re willing to pay to continue living in alignment with them.

Kevin Johns: A lot of the clients I work with are writing their book and building their platform at the same time. Terence, you had a bit of a different experience, in that you were already really successful online. Did that add an interesting wrinkle when the book didn’t sell? Was there any sense of, “I’ve got all these people loving what I do every day — how are you people not buying this in a week?” That’s a different frustration than most writers have to deal with.

Terence: Yeah. This has been across the board: everyone’s been like, “Oh, you have a million followers, you’ll get an agent immediately. Oh, you have a million followers, the book will be bought,” blah blah blah. But it’s absolutely not the case. Unless you’re nonfiction — there, it matters. It was really surprising to me when, literally in agents’ submission requirements, it would say, “If you’re nonfiction, we want to know your follower count.” And I’m like, “What about mine?” So it doesn’t correlate.

Kevin Johns: So now that you’ve self-published, what’s been your strategy for converting those millions of social media followers into actual book buyers?

Terence: Right now, in terms of strategy, the first wave was going back to the content that blew up — the posts that had the success, where people were asking for the book — and literally going into the comment section and saying, “The book is available now.” So, re-engaging that audience and promoting the content that worked, and now teasing not only that it’s available, but what the book’s about. And it’s doing the work it’s supposed to do. It’s definitely converting, which I didn’t know it would. Just because I have a million followers — this content could have only 300 views, so who can say?

So that was one part. And then a really big part was understanding the Amazon platform and ads, and how to use them to market the book digitally. My background is in marketing, so I do have a bit of a leg up there.

Kevin Johns: Okay, so we’ve got Terence, self-publishing with a marketing background, killing it on Amazon and TikTok, and Ellen living in the traditional publishing world, having tons of success and winning awards there. What are each of you jealous of in the other’s approach? Terence, when you look at Ellen and her traditional path, what do you admire about what she’s been able to do? And Ellen, watching Terence self-publish, what have you seen him do that you wish you could do in the traditional world?

Terence: The list of things I admire — I’ll get emotional just saying it. First, watching her go through the process from her first draft all the way through. I’m fortunate enough that I got to be an early reader, and to watch her in the edit process, receiving edits from other editors. How meticulous and pristine and smart and thoughtful she is in how she works through her own work — it aligns beautifully with the traditional workstream, but really with any workstream. There’s such care. I admire that, and I work actively to be more like her, though I’ll never achieve such perfection.

And part of me is like, “Oh, I’d love to have the traditional marketing arm behind this.” I’m jealous of paper covers — the weight of paper you can get traditionally. I’m jealous of sprayed edges. All the yummy things you get with traditional publishing.

Kevin Johns: And Ellen?

Ellen: For me, I’d just say Terence is one of the most generous human beings in the world, and it’s very difficult to be jealous. I’m just so happy for him, and I’m so proud of him. I get emotional too.

But there is one thing, and that’s instant results. He’s been sharing with me day to day: “Now we’ve sold this many on Amazon.” That’s incredible to me, because as a traditionally published author, you don’t know for six to eight months whether you’ve sold ten copies or a thousand. You have no idea. So it’s those instant results and instant feedback. I actually keep bothering him: “Can you send me something?” Because I’m so interested in the fate of this book, and it’s just fun for me to know, “Oh, you mean there are that many page reads on Kindle?” I didn’t even know what that was, because traditional publishers don’t take part in Kindle Unlimited. So I’m learning a lot, and I’m really loving being on the edge of this process and so invested in the success of this book.

Kevin Johns: Wait till you find out he gets paid monthly from Amazon. He doesn’t have to wait for some quarterly check that may or may not arrive.

Ellen: I know! Actually, it’s twice yearly for us.

Terence: Very —

Ellen: Yeah, twice yearly. It’s a long time between when you sell a book and when you see that dollar from it.

Kevin Johns: Well, clearly you two have great synergy. You respect one another and make a great coach–client team. But it sounds like at some point that evolved into a collaboration on a screenplay. Tell me a little about how that happened and what the movie’s about.

Terence: Again, I was kind of known for the Christmas stories, so I was approached by a production company that has done many Hallmark Christmas movies, and they asked if I’d be interested. I said, “I don’t know how to write a screenplay.” So I asked, “Ellen, would you like to co-write this with me?” And Ellen said, “Absolutely.”

It’s very much a Hallmark kind of formula. We didn’t even come up with the concept — they gave us the concept. It’s a royal Christmas portrait, set in some magic kingdom where two people fall in love, and you know the whole formula. But it’s lovely. It’s still out on submission, so we don’t know yet.

Ellen: Yeah, we don’t know. But it was a fun process, and I think we did learn through the work on Terence’s book. It’s an interesting thing, how you find the right people at the right time, whether it’s a coach or a collaborator. We found that Terence is so fast. He can create and draft something in a way that’s unbelievable to me, because I’m very slow. With the screenplay, he wrote a draft in, was it four days or something? A first draft. And it was 200 pages, and of course it could only be 100.

Kevin Johns: Well, that’s classic Hollywood. You’ve got your cocaine on one side and endless coffee on the other, you don’t sleep for four days, and you get that first draft done, right?

Terence: Yeah, that was definitely what it was like.

Ellen: That’s where I came in. I thought, “Okay, a lot of good stuff here.” One of my superpowers is seeing what we need and what we don’t need. So I’d make the cuts — and he’s not precious about that, so I would just go in and cut. In that way, we found that it wasn’t only a good editor–client relationship; it turned into a collaborator relationship too. We already knew how each other worked, and that we were a good fit.

Kevin Johns: Fantastic. Well, Alice of Oz is out now. Terence, tell the listeners a little about how you came to merge Alice in Wonderland with The Wizard of Oz with — what am I missing? What’s the third one? Peter Pan.

Terence: Yeah. The concept I’d come up with for this video series was that there are sort of wormholes into each fantasy universe, and in my head, they’re all actually accessible through Kensington Gardens. So I went from Peter Pan to Alice, and then I thought, “Oh wait, I can actually create origin stories for all of these characters from the other universes, and set that in Oz.” So Alice becomes a known character in Oz — these are characters who are near and dear to people’s hearts. I just love this interconnected, interwoven multiverse, if you will.

So I put that first video out thinking, “Oh, this will be good content,” and it exploded. There was a lot of nostalgia — I was a big Return to Oz fan, so that sort of framed it. I realized, “This is really sticky. People are really into this.” And the question I asked myself as I wrote it, all the way up until last month, was: could I really sit down and do these characters justice in a new universe?

Kevin Johns: And then, Ellen, Summerland Cove is the one that came out this summer, right?

Ellen: Yes.

Kevin Johns: What were the origins of that story? I know you always write about families and secrets, but what was the unique spark of inspiration for Summerland Cove?

Ellen: Thanks for asking. That one was inspired by — I live here on the coast of Maine, and I’ve previously written more historical fiction set in the early twentieth century, but I wanted to try something a little more contemporary. As it happens, there’s this place on the coast that I drive to and then take a walk around. It’s a community of summer cottages, and they’re so picturesque, looking out at the ocean. I’d go there in the winter and see nobody there, and then I’d go in the summer and see all these cars from all around the nation parked — you could tell from the license plates that people were there visiting for just a week or two. And I thought that was so interesting as a setting for a novel.

You come to your summer cottage on the ocean in Maine. It’s this quaint old place — it’s drafty, the windows rattle, it’s not fancy — but it’s your dream place. And you come and you bring all the baggage from your life. Then what happens when you bring all these extended family members together? So that was the inspiration: walking by these houses.

I’ve often been inspired by houses, because I love family stories, and I think a house is such an important symbol. It also contains the story, and you can use it to play with time. My story goes back and forth in time to tell the story of this family in this cottage where they’ve lived for a hundred years or so. It’s the kind of story I love — a little bit of a mystery, very emotional, and lots and lots of secrets, as you said. I like to have the secrets all come out.

Kevin Johns: You mentioned you’ve been doing some interviews together — this isn’t the first. Do you have any other upcoming marketing things you’re going to do together? Any joint signings, or something cool like that, where folks could get to meet both of you?

Terence: I would love a joint signing. That sounds like a great idea — I think I’m going to take that. I think it’s more podcasts and some written interviews; that’s the most I’ve seen on the horizon.

Ellen: Yeah, an event would be fun if it could work out. But we’re just doing all that we can from our respective locales.

Kevin Johns: Have you ever had the opportunity to meet each other in person?

Ellen: No, never.

Terence: I think about it all the time. I’m like, “All right, it’s going to happen one of these days, and I’m just going to break down and cry.”

Kevin Johns: I’ve started hosting retreats, and one of the reasons was that I’ve got clients I’ve had for ten years and never met. And I thought, I’ve got to start putting together events and opportunities for us to actually see each other. So I’ll cross my fingers for both of you, and hopefully you’ll get to cross paths in real life — well, this is real life — in person, at some point in the near future.

Well, if folks want to check out Alice of Oz, or see your TikTok feed, I assume — where should we send folks, Terence?

Terence: On TikTok, it’s @papaterence: P-A-P-A-T-E-R-E-N-C-E.

Kevin Johns: And Alice of Oz is available everywhere?

Terence: For the most part, at least digitally. We’re still waiting on retailers to pick up physical copies. But you can go to aliceofoz.com, or to Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Kevin Johns: Fantastic. And Ellen, where can folks pick up Summerland Cove?

Ellen: It should be available anywhere books are sold, and you can find more information at ellenbakernovels.com.

Kevin Johns: Beating Terence as a client is going to be pretty darn difficult, I imagine. But I think you also have a waiting list for your client work on your website, don’t you, Ellen?

Ellen: Yeah. I wish there were four of me to do all of this. I love working with people, especially seeing them grow to the extent that Terence has. I’ve had many clients go on to publish books, and it’s always so gratifying and so satisfying. It’s almost more so than my own work, because we all, as writers, wrestle with ourselves to some degree. We struggle, and we find all the flaws — at least I do. So to be able to be purely proud and happy about the work he has done, and that we’ve done together — and to accept that neither one of us could have done anything like this without the other —

Terence: No.

Ellen: — is pretty great.

Kevin Johns: What a beautiful note to end on. Well, Terence and Ellen, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Ellen and Terence: Thank you so much.