Nicolas ColeCo-Founder Ship 30 for 30, Premium Ghostwriting Academy

This Famous Author Makes $100,000 A MONTH on Substack

5 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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1:24

In this monologue, Nicolas Cole explains how acclaimed literary author George Saunders, despite being a writer in a genre that typically earns modest incomes, has built one of the top ten paid literary Substacks, generating an estimated $70,000‑$100,000 per month (about $1 million annually). Cole outlines the backstory: for two decades Saunders taught a university class on Russian literature, selecting short stories and discussing them with students. Five years ago he turned that material into the book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which presents selected Russian stories followed by Saunders’ commentary. The paid Substack is essentially an endless extension of that concept—each week Saunders picks a short story and shares his commentary, offering readers the same deep literary analysis on an ongoing basis. This model demonstrates how a literary professor can monetize expertise by repurposing classroom content into a subscription newsletter.

Chapters

The writer George Saunders, he's a well-known American literary writer, very talented writer, but a literary writer. And literary writers typically don't make very much money. His Substack is one of the top 10 most successful paid literary Substacks. Based on some napkin math, his newsletter, I am guesstimating, does somewhere in the ballpark of $70,000 to $100,000 a month. A month. For a literary paid newsletter. What most people don't know is the backstory to this. For the past 20 years, George has been teaching a class about Russian literature. What he does, he chooses different Russian short stories, and then throughout the semester they talk about them. 5 years ago, he wrote a book called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. The book is the book version of his class, is him selecting 5 or 7 really well-known Russian short stories, and the book is structured where you read a part of the short story and then read George Saunders' commentary on things he's noticing in the text. Does anyone want to guess what the value proposition is of his paid newsletter? He's been teaching a class for 20 years. He turns that class into a book. And what is his paid newsletter? It is a swim in a pond in the rain, but it never ends. Every week he picks a short story. Every week he shares his commentary on it. And that is generating him $1 million a year as a literary professor.