OK publishing from Ulysses to Substack is probably too easy to be worth a complete blog post. And yet I managed to mess it up on my first try – meaning that I had to go back and re-format all my text and re-do all my hyperlinks.
I really wish that someone had written a quick tutorial online explaining that it’s just a quick preview as HTML and then cut-and-paste into your Substack. It would have saved me some grief.
Back Up a Second…What’s a Substack?
Substack is a relatively new micropublishing platform that is designed to provide an income for writers with small but loyal audiences.
I’ve got a substack called “The Wilder I” which is a series of explorations into wildness, life and processes that are in some way “alive.” Check out “The Wilder I” here to get a taste of Substack-iness.
Substack Has a Good Editor Built-In, Why Not Use That?
If you’ve written on Medium then writing on Substack will be familiar. So why not just write your whole article there?
Gremlins. I’ve had a buggy internet connection devour hours of work on WordPress more than once. Because Ulysses has a very good publish to WordPress function, including adding categories and tags, I now write all my online pieces in Ulysses.
The other advantage to writing in Ulysses is that you’ve got your text with you even when you’re offline.
OK, So It’s Ulysses to Substack Then
Step 1. Set up your Substack newsletter in Ulysses the way you want it to appear, including all heading styles, bold and italic styling, the links and all the images you plan on using. Check your spelling, grammar, whatever.
Also, if you’ve built your newsletter on more than one sheet, glue them together now.
Step 2. Open your Substack dashboard and click New Post.
Step 3. Go back to Ulysses, click the Quick Export icon in the top menu (box with up arrow) and select HTML as your output type. Click Preview and you will see your Ulysses document in all it’s cascading glory.
Step 4. Select All the content in the open HTML preview. Then paste this into your empty Substack doc. Boom.
Well, you’ll have to fiddle with the header and subhead. But the rest of your text, images, and links will be intact.
A Couple of (cough) “Best Practices”
I sync Ulysses from my Mac to my mobile devices using iCloud. Inside my Ulysses folder I have a folder called Images, and that’s here I keep all the images I use for Substack. This way Ulysses can give me a preview of any pictures I have embedded in a document whether I’m on my Mac at home or on my iPad at the coffee shop.
I give all my images simple descriptions with a leading date, such as “20190609dogSlobber.jpg” This way the image files will sort by name chronologically regardless of the actual creation or modification date.
I’m Out
That’s all I have to say on that. If you’ve found this page through a web search I hope it helps.
Like I said, check out “The Wilder I” on Substack, and feel free to post your comments. It helps me reach a wider audience.
