Interview with C.A.N. Crown Award Winner Carla Hoch

The Christian Authors Network’s innovative Crown Awards celebrate excellence in Christian Media and Marketing.

Purpose: To recognize, educate, and encourage excellence in marketing and promotion skills of all Christian authors. The awards are given in three categories:

• Visual Media
• Broadcasting
• Web Presence

Carla Hoch is the CAN Marketing Web Presence Media Gold Award Winner for her promotion of her online brand, FightWrite™.

Carla past led to her studying self-defense and training women speaking on emotional abuse, precursors to physical violence, personal and emotional boundaries and tips for staying safe and escaping abusive scenarios. Carla started a blog after teaching about writing fight scenes at conferences.

Tell us about your blog.

FightWrite™ is a writer’s resource for writing fight scenes, action and violence of any kind. It covers all aspects of conflict: technical movement, biological precipitators and aftermath, psychological impact and the craft of putting it all together.

What led you to create it?

I was writing a book with fight scenes in it and didn’t know the first thing about fighting. So, I took a self-defense class. That class was the spark that launched me full throttle into martial arts. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn.

While attending the Realm Makers Writer’s Conference, I was asked to be on a panel regarding fight scenes. A conference coordinator knew a bit about my training and asked me to sit on the panel as a fighting “expert.” Far from expert, I sat on the panel and although there were many questions regarding the craft of writing, more often than not, writers just wanted to know about fighting, how to do it and how it felt.

The next year, at the same conference, the coordinators asked if I could do a live critique of a couple fight scenes. As a former high school teacher, I had plenty of experience teaching rowdy groups so I said, sure, why not? By that time, I had several years of training under my belt.

As I critiqued the fight scenes, I would demonstrate why they did or didn’t work. An editor friend of mine, Ben Wolf, who had some martial arts training assisted me. He let me throw him around and the crowd loved it. If you’ve never seen me, you might not appreciate the spectacle of it. I’m the size of a strapping fifth grade boy, plus, I’m a wee bit long in the tooth. I don’t look like someone who knows how to make a fist, much less what to do with it.

When I got off the stage, Quill Pen Editorial Services approached me about editing fight scenes for them. And it suddenly occurred to me how big a need there was for help in writing fight scenes. So, I got the crazy idea to start a blog. And, here I am, going stronger than ever since 2016.

How does your passion motivate you to promote your blog? What keeps you motivated?

It doesn’t. And, I am seldom motivated to write or promote or train. But that has no bearing on whether or not I work. If I only did what I was motivated to do I’d be in bed eating chocolate and watching reruns.

Motivation is like a fire. Sometimes there are lightning strikes that start the fire. But that is rare. For the most part, you have to create a fire. You can’t just look at the fireplace and think, when there is a fire in the fireplace, I will start the fire in the fireplace. You have to get up, get the ash out, get the wood and kindling in, light the thing and then tend do it.

Motivation is a beautiful thing. And the ugliest excuse.

You don’t have a lot of books, so what else is part of your brand?

I am a regular featured writer for Writer’s Digest and an instructor for Writer’s Digest University. I have a blog, FightWrite.net, to which I post regularly, as well as a podcast, and IG and YouTube channels. I teach at writers’ conferences, do contract mentoring and editing for individuals and publishers. I stay busy.

How has your personal training in fighting helped you develop a brand? What are your special areas of martial arts?

Fight training has toughened my resolve, muzzled my ego and created in me a dogged determination to be better tomorrow than I was today. It has taught me how to take punches, how to fall, and how to get back to my feet and that losing is not the same as being beaten. It has shown me the value of mistakes and that, more often than not, success is a battle of attrition. I don’t have to be the best. I just have to be the best at not giving up. But, above all, fight training has taught me that my greatest opponent is and will always be me. I have to believe in me, I have to be on my side or the battle will never end and without rest, a fighter is as good as dead.

Creating anything, whether it be a brand, book or boat, is a battle. It’s a battle against doubt, distractions and discouragement. It’s a battle against naysayers and those who believe your success lessens their own. Fighting hasn’t helped me develop my brand. It’s the backbone of it.

My fighting experience…ok, let me think here. I call it fight experience because not all falls into a category of martial art. I have training in: aikido, Brazilian jiujitsu, iaido (katana work), judo, MMA, Muay Thai, tae kwon do, Filipino Martial arts (bladework) street defense (self-defense with weaponry) and am learning some wrestling. I’ve also been taught a wee bit of kung fu. Of all I’ve studied, Brazilian jiujitsu is the one I keep coming back to. I train 5-6 days a week and compete every now and then. I’m competing in a world championship next month.

You won gold for your won gold for your brand FightWrite™ and your overhauled website. What made it more professional? What components should writers look at in changing their website?

After my first CAN award, I was interviewed by the wonderful Thomas Umstattd who runs Author Media and is the host of the Novel Marketing Podcast. If readers remember only one thing from this interview, it should be Thomas Umstattd. Seriously.

After the interview he was kind enough to chat with me and give me some hard truths. One of those was that my site needed a major overhaul. At that time, it was still a blogger site and cumbersome to navigate at best.

I took his Author Media classes on building a social media platform, made a million notes and followed every single one. My site looks like it does because of Thomas Umstattd and his classes. I still go back and listen to his podcasts for help in maintaining my site. I’m working on the SEOs right now and have almost doubled page views in one month.

Here are a few things I learned from Thomas:

1. Your site should have a clear purpose. Are you trying to sell more books? Are you building a brand or fan base? Be sure that the home page meets the needs of that purpose.

2. Have a few call-to-action buttons. You can have a million pages on your site. Take out the most important one, two or three and make buttons that send people directly to those pages. Leave the rest in a pull-down menu. I have three call-to-action buttons: Read the Blog, Buy the Book, Contact Me.

3. Do only what you can do. You don’t have to pay money for a professional site. But you need a site that looks professional. If you can do that using YouTube, go, you!

4. Listen to the Novel Marketing Podcast.

Why is it important to use a paid rather than a free website host?

I’m not sure it always is. If you can’t afford a paid host, I think you can still have a site that looks amazing. However, your web address will have the host’s name. Even though I owned the domain fightwrite.net, my actual address was fightingwrite.blogspot. And that was all I needed for the first few years when information was my only product.

Once I began teaching and writing for Writer’s Digest and booking more conferences, I needed more than the free site.

To overhaul my site, I went to Stormhill Media. They specialize in author websites. And, if you use them, tell them I sent you. You might get a wee discount.

It took a while to get traction on your site. What helped?

Thomas Umstattd. Seriously, I owe him a great deal. And, as I said, tweaking my SEOs has doubled my traffic in a month. SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It’s a tool that helps you rank higher on search engines. Whenever anyone Googles “writing fight scenes,” my SEOs help my site to pop up toward the top of the search results.

What incentives did you use to attract followers?

I give them something they need that’s just not out there in the way I present it.

Did you try marketing strategies that did not work for you? What did you learn from them?

First and foremost, I try to make quality blog posts. A problem I had at first was coming up with a blog idea and then trying to create a good SEO to make my post pop up whenever anyone searched for the topic. After listening to the Novel Marketing Podcast, I learned to FIRST look at what people were searching for and THEN create the blog.

Which aspects of marketing do you enjoy the most?

I like making IG posts. I’m kind of artsy.

Which aspects do you find most challenging?

All of it. Marketing myself or my book isn’t something I’m naturally good at. I have to really work at it.

What marketing advice can you give bloggers or podcasters that you wished you had gotten, or that you wish you would have heeded?

Everything happened for me in the time it should have. For others, do your research. Take courses on marketing your book, making a site, optimizing SEO. Take notes and have one goal at the time. And be patient with yourself. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is a web site.

How do you come up with new ideas for your podcast and blog?

I ask writers what they are looking for and I use AnswerThePublic.com. It’s a brilliant tool!

What’s involved in getting a trademark and why was that important to you?

The more work I did under the brand, the more aware I was that people could piggyback off my hard work. Getting a ™ is a matter of paperwork and fees. It can take a year or more for the ™ to become ®. A ™ is simply a place holder which announces to the world that you are seeking registration for something. The sticky part is if that ™ is challenged by another entity wanting a similar trademark or if another exists that is too similar.

Please share how you keep your site in the top 100 of Writer’s Digest sites for writers.

I can’t say for sure what WD is looking for in its Top Sites for Writers list. And, I don’t know if I’m on it until the list comes out. What I do know is that my site is the only of its kind.

Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers about your marketing or writing journey?

Don’t give up. Mohammed Ali estimated that over the course of his career he was struck some 29,000 times. Since then, research has shown that number is closer to 200,000. There are two things we can learn from that. One, Ali was more interested in moving forward than keeping up with the punches he took. Two, he never saw himself as less than the greatest of all time even when another fighter was able to tag him. Getting hit was just part of it of the process. He wasn’t the fighter he was despite the punches he took. He was who he was because he took them.

Your work will be criticized. You will be turned down. You will be discouraged. And that is good. It is all part of being a writer. Like Ali, you won’t be the writer you should become despite the punches. You will be the writer you should become because of the punches. Don’t give up. Consider the tough times as simply part of the process. And, there may be tough times when you may have to back away from writing. That is ok. It’s not a race. There’s enough success to go around.