Writing can be hard – not hard like mining diamonds in Zimbabwe or making cheap clothes for westerners in Bangladesh, of course, but anyone in the 21st-century knowledge economy who wants to write a novel must have some kind of masochistic streak. Word processors have taken some of the strain out of editing and publishing, but there’s no app to automate the hard slog of getting 100,000 words down on paper in something resembling a coherent narrative. And the work doesn’t stop there for SFF writers, who have to construct an entire fictional world to support their stories.

Enter the Apocalypse Weird, stage right. If any group of authors can find a way to collaborate on telling stories it’s those rebellious indie authors, authors who have already broken all the rules of publishing by stealing the ebook market out from under the industry. While writers may not be able to collaborate on individual books, they can work together to create the fictional “shared world” those books happen within, the world of Apocalypse Weird.

Think of an apocalypse, and Apocalypse Weird has it covered. Zombies? Yes of course. There’ s clearly a little inspiration from The Walking Dead here, but Apocalypse Weird takes things much further. Cannibal hordes, cities sinking beneath the waves, genetic mutants, electric fog, frozen arctic winds and gojira are the backdrop for this shared world, in which some dozen or more established indie authors are each creating a standalone book series.

Nick Cole, author of the Wasteland Saga, opened the Apocalypse Weird last year with his free novel The Red King. It’s a gutsy, cool chunk of pulp fiction that struck me as echoing the best of Joe R Lansdale and other masters of American gothic. It follows the battle for survival in a suburban wasteland as the Apocalypse Weird unfolds, and sets the tone for the five novels published in the shared world this month, bringing in authors EE Giorgi, Jennifer Ellis, Chris Porteau and Michael Bunker.

The creative collaboration on Apocalypse Weird is scheduled to include 20 authors, with two new titles releasing each month. There are also plans for a fan-fiction thread, in which readers will be able to expand on the stories of their favourite characters with the chance of their contributions becoming canon in the Apocalypse Weird universe. There’s an impressive level of creativity and ambition in this indie publishing collaboration, something too often missing from mainstream publishing today.

Shared worlds are of course not a new idea. They’re commonplace in franchise fiction, but the major franchises in sci-fi and fantasy were all born in TV and film, not books. Shared worlds like the Star Trek universe benefit from the enormous marketing spends of Hollywood to build immense recognition with readers. Apocalypse Weird does not have those resources, but it’s a smart attempt to build a similar kind of recognition for a franchise born in books.

If Nick Cole, Michael Bunker and the other writers of Apocalypse Weird are successful, shared worlds, owned by their creators rather than corporate marketing departments, could become an integral part of the independent publishing scene. And who knows, maybe a few years from now I’ll be reporting back on the first Apocalypse Weird movie. Weirder things have certainly happened.