When the gatekeepers said no,
dozens of successful indie authors said go.
When the entertainment industry collapses, a laid-off filmmaker finds self‑published authors making a living telling stories without gatekeepers, and asks them to teach him how, on camera.
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The film
Against the backdrop of the 2023–2024 entertainment industry collapse, Anthony Mormile loses his dream producing job, and his spec screenplays are going nowhere. Somewhere between unemployment and a part-time shift at an ice cream shop, he stumbles into a thriving online community of writers who make a living telling stories without waiting on anyone's permission: self‑published indie authors.
Inspired by their success, Anthony makes a documentary about learning from the industry's leading experts, and uses it to hold himself accountable to writing and self-publishing his debut novel on camera. He asks for mentorship, and dozens of six- and seven-figure authors, and the editors, designers, and marketers who serve them, give it, sharing the secrets and best practices behind their businesses, their book launches, and their earnings.
After a harrowing creative journey, Anthony's book comes out. It doesn't turn a profit. And every expert in the film says the same thing. You haven't failed if you keep going. Go long enough and you learn, you grow, and success becomes inevitable. Part vlog, part masterclass, it ends with Anthony employed again, with plans to write the next book.
Documentary feature · 96 minutes · English, captions available · Winter 2027
Director's statement
When I decided to write and self-publish my book, I wanted to watch a documentary about indie publishing that would fire me up the way Star Wars: Empire of Dreams, American Movie, and Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse always have with filmmaking. Unfortunately, I couldn't find one, and I had a feeling I knew why: showing the writing process isn't enough to sustain a viewer for a feature's running time. It needed to be juxtaposed with something else to stay cinematic.
That something else came from King Corn, Playing with FIRE, and, most of all, Super Size Me, films where you learn about a whole industry from the people in it while following a filmmaker's unorthodox experiment related to that community. Instead of eating McDonald's for thirty days straight, I would write and self-publish a novel, however long it took, with experts explaining each step, and B-roll and animated recreations of their process keeping the cuts back to me fresh.
Write Selfishly was built with the audience in mind from the very beginning, so it was important to address the elephant in the room. In the forums where I found many of those experts, their success stories seemed to be quite polarizing. Half the readers find them inspiring, and I'm in that half. The other half find them discouraging, because the sales and earnings the experts describe feel so far out of reach. My journey is the remedy for that second half. They can watch me lose money on my first book, stay thoroughly mediocre, and keep going anyway, which is exactly what the experts told me to do. My hope is that people come away inspired by one or the other: by the success stories, or by watching me and deciding, "I can do better than him," and then setting out to do just that.
Who's in it
Thirty authors, editors, designers, marketers, and one cognitive psychologist, filmed over two years.
Write Selfishly releases in Winter 2027. Sign up and you'll hear about in-person screenings near you and the day it goes live online. That's all we'll send.
Check your inbox for one confirmation email. Once you click it, you're on the list.
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