Writing short stories to fill flesh out your world

I've written a short story and several novelettes/novellas that take place before my first Draconia book and between Books 1 and 2.

The short story was an experiment inspired by the opening scene in Disney's Dinosaur, which showed the main character in his egg. One of the novelettes explores the backstory of one of the core characters. The others are just story ideas that wouldn't fill a full novel. I have others in mind that I hope to write someday, including an extended epilogue to Book 3.

Scenes mostly. I easily have 100k words worth of stuff that's never going to see the light of day, but writing them helped me figure out characters better or world stuff. There's conversations or interactions that happen off screen or in the past so me writing them for myself helps me sort things out.

I've done this twice (one deleted scene and one original short), and I have a few other things in draft format. I have vague ambitions to publish a collection at some point, but that would require organization.

Yes. I put them on my website as freebies, once they reach a tolerable stage of readability. (At some point I will either lengthen them into short novels (novellas for individual sale) or compile them into an anthology.)

I find writing them to be a great way to figure out parts of the world not yet built, and then details from those stories can influence the novel(s). It's also a good way to take a break from an arduous WIP. It's also a good way to interact with a new writing group, if you want to share something but feel overly protective of your main project. The critique on the shorts can often be generalized to other projects, which the writing group has not yet seen.

Under the 20BooksTo50K model, regular releases is a good way to build an audience, when self publishing. So, this 'backlog' may really come in handy some day. We shall see.

I tried to do something like this. It was a booklet of the inventions my characters used. I made a few pages in MS Word. It turned out awful. Maybe one day--after the series is finished--I could pick it up again, but with professional help with the illustrations because I suck at art. Just a thought.