A Georgetown graduate course, led by author and entrepreneur Tom Gardner, has received a large advance to write a book on finance. Gardner assigned the writing assignment to his class as part of a six-week project to write, edit and market a bestselling book.
“We all thought it was a really weird, really cool project,” said Abby George (GRD ‘02), a student in the class. George is a first year business graduate student and a member of the book’s marketing team.
Gardner, who is also co-founder of The Motley Fool, a user-friendly Internet finance site, felt the project was the perfect way to teach entrepreneurship.
“I thought since it was a class on entrepreneurship, we needed to have some enterprise,” Gardner said. “You can’t learn entrepreneurship by writing a paper.”
Using his experience in producing books with The Motley Fool, Gardner outlined the process to his students, dividing them into planners, researchers, writers, editors and marketers.
In the five weeks the class has been working on the project, a draft of the book has been finished, and according to George, the class has been offered a “sizable advance,” though she could not say from which publisher.
The book will be entitled “The Georgetown McDonough School of Business and the Motley Fool presents: Einstein’s Miracle,” and will explain the concept of compound interest to a broad audience.
Gardner said the biggest challenge in the project has been to relate an unfamiliar idea to readers in a simple, fun manner.
“We feel our competition is ignorance and tediousness,” Gardner said.
George said the class dealt with the challenge by presenting the material in a straightforward manner, modeling their marketing strategy on the best-selling finance book, “Who moved my cheese?”
“We thought that if a book this cheesy can be a best seller, we could make a best seller too,” George said.
According to Brewster Crosby, the head planner of the book, the project’s success comes from the team’s “wildly unconventional” creative process, drawing heavily on brainstorming and a fun work atmosphere.
“It’s like throwing buckets of paint on the wall and seeing what we’ve created,” Crosby said.
Gardner said he hopes to have the book in stores by December, and thinks that the bestseller list is still a reasonable goal.
“We have some fun secret weapons that will make it a unique book,” Gardner said.
Beyond the valuable experience gained from the project, the team feels rewarded that the book will have a positive impact on the public.
“Across the globe, [ entrepreneurship] is an issue people and families need to be aware of,” said George.
All profits from the book will go to the Business School financial aid fund.
