: Re: How to complement a novel with short stories - what to avoid I have given my novel to beta readers now. hurray! I'm also very pointedly not looking at it for a few weeks. I'm spending these

@Smith147

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I doubt there are any rules set in stone for this, but here are some suggestions:

Be careful introducing information. Your short stories will likely be considered "canon" so you don't want to introduce anything harmful for the bigger stories. Here are some of the things you should pay special attention to:

Introducing new tech ("if those people have gunpowder, why didn't they use it when under attack?")
Making a mess in the timeline (ultra-fast travel, characters in places they shouldn't be, mentioning characters not yet born, etc. There are many ways to screw this up, so I'm not expanding much)
Taking the characters off course (you may really want to write a story about your main character petting kittens, but they probably won't do it while there's an intergalactic war raging and they must reach Earth ASAP)
Introducing anything, anything that contradicts the "main" stories. Even worse if you try to justify a mistake on the original work. (Writing a scene saying that that Deus Machina was not actually Deus Machina because the character had found the McGuffin before, but you, the author, absent-mindedly forgot to tell the audience)
Scenes so important that they should be part of the main story.
Spoilers, spoilers everywhere. As an author, you know everything that will happen, so it's easy to let some secret information slip through. Pay extra attention to that. You may plant some clues for later use, but be careful.

Final note:

Ideally, everyone who reads the book will read the short stories and vice-versa, but this often won't be true. Your book has to work well without the stories, so don't introduce crucial things there and take them for granted later.

Conversely, the short stories should be enjoyable without the companion book, at least on some degree. Most short stories focus on minor characters or character backstory or, sometimes, what happens to the characters when the book is over. Think of the stories like DLC to the book. Content not everyone needs to read, but that will make the main book more enjoyable.

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