August 2025 - Pseudonyms and tax fraud

Hey all,

Time for another round of Raddon’s Ramblings! Yes, I’m trademarking that. No, there’s no discussion, sorry.

I’ve got a million things to talk about, but I honestly have no idea what would be interesting for you all to know, so if anyone has any questions or topics they’d like me to delve into once a month, please go ahead and reach out on any of my socials (facebook, reddit, website, royalroad, patreon – see, there’s loads!).

This month I’m going to talk about my pseudonym, and my online presence in general. That’s right – I have a website now! I’m a real author!

Seriously though, it’s been really weird making the transition from hobbyist to paid author. I still work a full-time job, and I still am spending god knows how many hours ‘writing’, but while from October-February I was spending most of my free time writing actual chapters, since April I’ve spent most of my free-time on administration.

Editing/re-writing has eaten up the vast majority of that, but a not-insignificant amount of my free-time has been spent researching publishers, reading and checking contracts, joining various organisations (Society of Authors here in the UK, and writer’s discords online) and then sorting out my online presence.

I’ve registered as a sole-trader with my government and have had to learn how all of that works so that I don’t accidentally commit tax fraud after getting my audiobook advance. I’ve had to build a website (actually quite easy, to be fair) and design a newsletter with automatic replies for the future to onboard new readers. I’ve had to create a google business page, get a business facebook page sorted and active so I can post in the right groups, and re-vamp my patreon, too.

To be clear, I’m not complaining. It’s not the most exciting work in and of itself, but it’s just awesome to know that the effort is actually warranted to set up a potential future of me earning at least a part-time living from my writing. (thanks again, by the way!)

So there’s a little peak behind the curtain at what is required if you’re going to make a little bit of money from writing on the backend. It’s not glamorous, but it is necessary. And none of it is all that difficult – there are loads of resources to help, but it’s a confusing quagmire to wade through on your own at first, and takes a significant amount of time looking through government websites, reading articles and listening to interviews, podcasts and checking out the websites and newsletters of your competitors/comparables.

Now onto the juicy bit: my pseudonym.

I always knew I wanted to remain somewhat anonymous. I grew up in the era where facebook was just becoming a thing, and putting your face out there was a weird new and scary thing. Kids these days seem to be taking vlogs and videos of themselves in all sorts of crazy situations for everyone to see, and while that personally terrifies me, it’s just a sign of times changing, I suppose.

-          Old man ramble over –

So my initials are actually OCR, hence the OCRAuthor handle I used on Royalroad and reddit when I started. But then when it came time to publish (and what a surprise that was, despite having submitted to a bunch of publishers), I realised I needed an actual pseudonym.

I know in our genre a lot of authors publish with their usernames, but I think there’s some anecdotal evidence that human names sell a bit better, and I do personally think they look a little cooler on a book, especially as litRPG and progression fantasy as sub-genres grow and entice more readers from trad fantasy over to our little degenerate corner of the literary soup.

But I needed a pen-name, so I looked around. It’s a surprisingly difficult thing to come up with. I wanted something kind of fantasy-ish (hence the ‘initial. Initial. Name’ format – think J. R. R. Tolkein or George R. R. Martin), but at the same time nothing too on the nose. Raven Grey-Mane or Ash J. Hunter are a bit too edgy for my taste. Thing is, ‘R’ is quite a tough initial to come up with a plausible, interesting surname for. There were a lot of ‘red+suffix’ names; Redhill, Redwood, Reddington, etc. but I wasn’t feeling them for some reason.

I also wanted some sort of sentimentality to it. In the end, after a lot of looking around, I settled on Raddon. It’s easy to spell/remember and I think it sounds vaguely fantasy-like. Most importantly it doesn’t have any connotations (that I’m aware of) or controversial figures, and when you google it, nothing crazy comes up.

It’s also vaguely sentimental. Raddon is the name of a little ridgeline not that far from where I live, and is apparently the old English translation of ‘redhill’, which I secretly like as a name but find too edgy to have directly. It also has connotations as ‘brookside’, meaning ‘near a stream/river’, which I find entirely too romantic to not love.

So I’ve gone with O.C. Raddon, and one day, once by book is published, I’m going to get my physical copy in my hands and walk to the top of Raddon ridge. I’m going to sit my back against a tree, in the evening sun, and I’m going to enjoy turning the pages of my own book as I experience Lamb’s story once more.

I think there’s a really nice circularity to all of that. ITSOM started my writing dreams, and it’s also going to mark, if not the culmination of them, at least the realisation of them.

Thanks all, for making my humble little dream a reality.

P.S. Dog Tax