Suffer the Little Children - Read it Now on #Wattpad

"After the death of his wife, Simon Fuller moves to a new home, with his two daughters. One day, his daughter introduces a new imaginary friend - Nathaniel. She 'gives' Nathaniel to her father, telling him he can keep the boy "forever". Simon tries to find out who the boy really is, but is unable to. Questioning his daughter, she tells him, again, that it's Nathaniel, but he prefers to be called by his nickname, Mr. Boogie."

Tied in to the Sinister movies, you can read Suffer the Little Children now on Wattpad.

Written by the author of Mr. Composure and Sin, Suffer the Little Children is the newest offering (for FREE!) from Shaun Allan.

Darker Places by Shaun Allan - Preorder now!

Darker Places: Shaun Allan, the author of Sin and Dark Places, returns with another delicious collection of nightmares, served them up with his usual original brilliance. You can preorder Dark Places now on Amazon, Smashwords, and Kobo. 

Here's the description:

 What if you could steal the final moments from the dying?  What if you had the darkest secret, but couldn’t think what it might be?  What if you entered the forest in the deep of the night.  Who is the melting man?  And are your neighbours really whom they appear to be?

So many questions.

To find the answers, you must enter a darker place.  Thirteen stories.  Thirteen poems.  Thirteen more doorways.

Publication date: May 1st

Links:

Amazon: http://getbook.at/DarkerPlacesEbook

Smashwords: http://bit.ly/DarkerPlacesSW

Kobo: http://bit.ly/DarkerPlacesKobo

Sin and Wattpad

Available here

The amazing Shaun Allan is visiting today with a guest blog about his experiences on Wattpad. Have a cup of tea and a biscuit, Shaun, and tell us what you have done on the site:

***

Wattpad.

Whopad?

Wherepad?

WHYpad?

Hmmm...  I have to profess that, until not too long ago, I’d not really heard of Wattpad – or at least realised its significance.  I’d seen reference to the site in a blog somewhere and decided to set up an account and post a couple of stories.  Then I did nothing.  There are sooo many author/social sites to keep up with, you can make yourself dizzy – and I was.  As such, Wattpad became a casualty of my life.  Little time to write and less time to meet, market and network.

Plus, it was just another site, wasn’t it?

Well, actually, it’s not.  Not just another site.  Wattpad has been described as the Youtube of books, and I can see why.  There are oodles of members (14 million unique monthly visitors) and countless stories, books and poems.  It’s so easy to find something – anything – to read on there, you’ll never be at a loss for a good story.  When I discovered this, I thought I should take Wattpad a little more seriously.  As such, I posted some stories, poems, and snippets from Sin and his blog.

On Amazon here

I had a few reads, some great comments (especially on The Hunger), and even some votes.

I was delighted, therefore, when they asked if I’d like Sin to be a Featured Book.  Surprised, too.  I mean, Sin?  It’s just a little story I wrote.  I didn’t expect it to be noticed like this.

Part of being a Featured Book meant that I’d have to put Sin on Wattpad in its entirety.  Now that was a scary idea.  I want people to buy my book, don’t I?  I want them to throw their money at me and scamper away with my novel clutched in their sweaty palms.

No, I didn’t.  Well, I did, of course, but that wasn’t the reason I wrote Sin, nor Dark Places, nor anything else.  I wrote it because the words would dribble out of my ears if I didn’t.  I wrote it because the characters had voices that needed to be heard.  I wanted people to read it.  And enjoy it.

The number of people who have sent messages to say how much they’re enjoying Sin has astounded me.  Not because I don’t think Sin has merit or is any good, I hope it IS.  But readers, and Sin has had hundreds of thousands thanks to Wattpad’s promotion (and, I hope, the fact that it’s quite good), are taking the time to say that the book is ‘a masterpiece’ and ‘unique’.  Not much can beat that particular warm fuzzy feeling right there.  I appreciate (and reply to) every single one.  If that person goes on to buy the book, fantastic, if they don’t, that’s up to them.

They’ve still reached out and touched me.  I like that.

Buy it here

Apart from anything else, I have other works on Wattpad too.  I have a couple of stories and poems from my Dark Places collection.  There’s some from Zits’n’Bits and Rudolph Saves Christmas (my children’s books).  I’ve also added some stories that are not published anywhere else.  The Hunger, Creature and Sin – Prelude, a sort of prequel story to the novel itself.  Being a Featured Book has, hopefully, opened up all my work to the eyes of readers who might, otherwise, not happen by.  I welcome them all.

So.  Wattpad.  It can be viewed online and they have an app.  It’s a truly portable library, in various ways like kindle, but it gives you many avenues to interact with readers and authors and the books themselves.

Thank you Wattpad, Maria and Pamela in particular, for the opportunity to showcase my book.  And thank you to everyone who has read it, whether you’ve commented, voted or not.  Sin, and all my books, are for you.

You can find Shaun Allan on Wattpad here. 

Sin, by Shaun Allan : Cover Reveal

I read Sin (available on US Kindle, UK Kindle, and print) by Shaun Allan last year, and I was blown away. The book is completely different from anything I'd read before, and Allan is a very unique voice. 


Today he is on Fresh Pot of Tea, to reveal the new cover for his book. Here it is, and it looks like a bestseller!

The new face of Sin. Look at the eyes! 

Welcome to Fresh Pot of Tea, Shaun! Have a biscuit. Could you please tell about your book, Sin?

Hi Allie.  Thanks for inviting me in.  Just the one sugar and not too much milk please.

Sin.  Well, to be honest, Sin seems much more than just a book, now.  He’s almost a person in his own right.  Where the book is concerned, Sin is a psychological thriller/urban fantasy in which Sin, the main character – who just wants to be an ordinary guy – finds himself the centre of some extraordinary circumstances.  People die around him and, to stop this, he incarcerates himself in a mental asylum but, when that doesn’t work, a failed suicide attempt finds him on the run – from himself and from the one other person who knows his secret.

Sin is an anti-hero.  You don’t know whether to like him or not, but often you can’t help but sympathise with his situation.  But, hero or anti, people still die.

Sin took ten years, from his initial short story (which is now the prologue) to complete.  I’m hoping the sequel won’t take half as long, but the way the character talks to me, and is so much a part of me, I really don’t think it will be.  Besides, he has been so well received, it seems to have made him MORE talkative.

The character of Sin has a great deal of me in him.  His sense of humour, his tangential thoughts about life, the universe and the price of fish, and so on.  Naturally, people don’t die around me, which is nice.  They say ‘write what you know’, and for a good while, I had to figure out just what I actually did know, but when I started writing Sin, it sort of flowed.  He had his own voice and I automatically seemed to base it around my local area.  Now this was a place, being from there, I thought of as almost boring, but then places like The Seven Hills became key locations, and they had a life I hadn’t seen before.

Sin was a sort of voyage of discovery for me, in a way.  I discovered a new viewpoint on where I lived.  I discovered odd thoughts and ideas that seemed to click together and I discovered a sense of humour in a dark side of myself.  Apart from that, as I had no idea what was going to happen until it did, I surprised myself by new characters and situations as they happened.

Shaun Allan

Sin has had a long journey towards a final cover. Could you please tell us about this final image and how you arrived at it?

I love the new cover.  It’s the third instalment – and the last.  The cover for Sin was originally that of a local asylum, but it didn’t show Sin himself, or his plight.  This cover does that superbly.

Thanks to the help of a certain wonderful person, Allie, I managed to find this image of a man literally cracking up.  Throughout the book you wonder if Sin is actually sane or crazy, and he, himself, feels he is falling apart and not in control of his own destiny, not least when his dead sister makes an appearance.  He simply wants to be an ordinary guy and would rather kill himself than have the awful things happening because of him.

As Sin is a narrative, the title text is my own handwriting, and I think Lisa Daly, the cover artist has done an excellent job of working that into the final cover.  I especially like the way his face seems to be dissolving away to sand, especially as a beach does play a part in the story.  It shows that he feels as if he’s losing himself.

And if you look in his eye, you can see the coin that was the catalyst for his whole series of misadventures.

It’s almost difficult to decide if Sin is a sympathetic character or not. To me, he’s brilliantly real because of his flaws. Do you like him?

I do.  I have to, I suppose, as he’s almost like me looking through a mirror into a sort of twilight version of myself.  For all his slightly twisted sense of humour and for all the bad things that happens, in the end, Sin just wants to be like you or me.  He wants to be ordinary.  The sort of person you’d pass in the street with little more than a nod to say hi.  The sort of person who can toss a coin just to decide whether to watch a movie or a soap.

Unfortunately, such decisions are taken out of his control, and that really isn’t his fault.  Whether he makes good choices or bad, he does them with the best intentions.

The book asks the question – could you kill a killer?  If you were to kill someone who was going to kill others, would that make you a hero or as bad as the person you killed?

And what if that killer was yourself?

Are good intentions a defence?

It’s not up to me to make up your mind for you.  Nor is it up to Sin.  But I hope, in the end, you’ll at least feel something for his plight.

What is your next project?

Pick one!  Well, I have a children’s book, an offbeat collection of poetry called Zits’n’Bits, which is hopefully going to be worked on.  I have another children’s book which I am working towards completing called Puddlebrain, about the youngest of three witches who have lost their powers.  She must save the villagers from a shadow that’s stealing everyone.  I’d actually written 30,000 words of this and then promptly forgotten about it whilst working on Sin, so I think it deserves to be resurrected.

Of course, there’s Sin’s blog, his diary from within the asylum, which is ongoing.  Sin never really likes to be quiet.  As such, once Puddlebrain is finished, there’ll be Sin’s sequel, Mortal Sin, to write.  That’s if no other characters or ideas muscle in first!




You can also find Shaun on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.