Depends on how you'll be using the fiction yourself. You can easily have your players read the novels, the web fiction, and the adventure path serials to give them a good grounding in Golarion without giving them access to too much information about significant NPCs and their actual motives. That said, the fiction is also an excellent source of both adventure scenarios and NPCs, so if you're going to use it for that yourself, you should ask your players not to read it beforehand.
Probably the easiest way to balance both is with Dave Gross's stories of the Count and Radovan, since if the players read all those, their knowledge of those can be said to be their characters having read the various publications of the Pathfinder society, so you can use the Count both as a source of fiction and as an NPC they can meet.
Other characters will be more problematic as NPCs if players have already read the fiction, since a good number of them would be far less chatty than the Count about their past exploits, or if not less chatty, at least less honest.
Generally, depends on what you plan to do. My suggestion would be to read all the web fiction first, decide which pieces you might want to reserve for NPCs or scenarios, then suggest one story or another to your players as suitable reading for them to design their own character backgrounds.
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Depends on how you'll be using the fiction yourself. You can easily have your players read the novels, the web fiction, and the adventure path serials to give them a good grounding in Golarion without giving them access to too much information about significant NPCs and their actual motives. That said, the fiction is also an excellent source of both adventure scenarios and NPCs, so if you're going to use it for that yourself, you should ask your players not to read it beforehand.
Probably the easiest way to balance both is with Dave Gross's stories of the Count and Radovan, since if the players read all those, their knowledge of those can be said to be their characters having read the various publications of the Pathfinder society, so you can use the Count both as a source of fiction and as an NPC they can meet.
Other characters will be more problematic as NPCs if players have already read the fiction, since a good number of them would be far less chatty than the Count about their past exploits, or if not less chatty, at least less honest.
Generally, depends on what you plan to do. My suggestion would be to read all the web fiction first, decide which pieces you might want to reserve for NPCs or scenarios, then suggest one story or another to your players as suitable reading for them to design their own character backgrounds.
Thanks for the advice