Are short stories a good idea before writing and publishing a novel?

Your short story collection would have each story titled with a character's name? Then in the novel, the characters would interact? What would be different about the ss collection so that I would still want to read the novel? Would I have to read the collection before I would understand the novel?

Would I be interested enough in the characters to want to read more (a novel) about them?

@Judy: That would be my goal, to make the short collection interesting enough to keep a reader's attention for a much longer novel. That interest in the characters would need to be built up in the shorts...

@Wondergirl: The shorts would have proper titles, and maybe something like (Character A series, part 1, 2, 3...) The shorts would be prequels to the novel. With 2 main character's meeting and interacting in the shorts, and a third that doesn't meet the first 2 until the novel...

I guess the concept is similar to Stephen Hunter's novels... where all of the main character's have their own stories and series of books, and they all combine within other character's novels...

Since I've already been working on the novel and have a good chunk written, no. One would not need to read the shorts to understand what is going on. There may be references to past events in a character's life that might be better spelled out in a short, but it wouldn't be 100% necessary to read the short...

Like Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code" and "Lost Symbol"... DVC references parts of "Angels and Demons" and LS references parts of both A&D and DVC...

The shorts would be small adventures of their own... The genre may or may not be considered adventure, but that's the idea...

And, in case you are wondering... No, I'm not writing the story/ies with a bazillion ellipses. lol

So, one could read the short stories first or the novel first. It wouldn't matter.

Lee Child is still writing his Jack Reacher series, but has written the short story "Second Son" (Jack as a child) and several short stories featuring Jack as unrelated to the series.

Yes, I vote go for it.

I also think it's a good idea.

I don't know if you would be interested or not. But here is a link to the ebook short story I was talking about. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/142830 ...

Once again, thanks for the advice and encouragement. It isn't perfect, even after 3 edits and revisions, but it's there. I'll be doing more editing for typos and re-publishing sometime in the near future... Also, story 2 is in the works already.

Thanks again!

What's your take on Smashwords? Are you able to market your books well enough?

P.S. Your link doesn't work.

Hm... lets try again... https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/142830

Smashwords works great for me so far... It makes the process easy enough, though I'd prefer to format my own way and upload an already good to go .epub file and .mobi file... But their "meatgrinder" does a good enough job as long as I stick to the formatting guidelines. It is of course a middleman and so when the books go out to other retailers for a price, I will get less of the profit, but that really doesn't bug me too much since I'll be getting more than I would have anyways...

I haven't done any real marketing besides facebook posts and telling friends/family and coworkers. Smashwords posts all newly published ebooks on the front page of the site as long as they have an actual cover of some sort. Then the book goes through an automated and a physical review before being sent out to the major retailers. If the book doesn't meet a certain standard, or if there are formatting problems, then the book will not go out to B&N, Kobo, Apple, etc...

Beyond that, the only tools available to promote the books are price changes or creating coupon codes. My book is currently free. Probably the next one will be as well. Then, after a few weeks or maybe after hitting so many downloads, I'll make them 99 cents...

What I really need to do is set myself up a blog somewhere and start promoting that way. I'd need to get followers from people that read the book onto the blog and have different "sales" or games where I give a coupon code for a review or something. I read that other Indie authors do similar things. They'll give a book for free to 10 people, and if they write a review, good or bad, they get a coupon code to get the second book for free...

I need to sit down and read the marketing guide that Smashwords has on the site for free. Just haven't done that yet...

So, my overall opinion is that Smashwords is a good tool for just getting the work out there quick fast and in a hurry. If an Indie Author wants to make the most money out of their works as they can, then they need to take the time to format their ebook as perfectly as possible, and use something like Calibre to make the actual ebook files. Then they need to go to each retailer and see how their self-publishing system works. It's all about time and effort in the real DIY world. Smashwords is a decent compromise.

I read through the Smashwords style guide twice marketing guide, so found out it's easy enough to do. I read Amazon's self-publishing guide too which seems almost easier for formatting the book. My main concern is that I have deliberate mistakes in dialogue and also lower case where there should be caps, and don't want those "fixed" by any editing system.