I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately! Honest! I just have been extremely lazy about posing it to all the places that y’all want to read it. Why? Because it’s actually a pain in the butt to cross-post a story to multiple websites. With visual art, a picture is a picture, regardless of format, and PostyBirb is sufficient to enable easy cross-posting. For a writer, though, it’s not nearly that simple.
My preferred writing tool is Obsidian, which allows me to write with Markdown formatting and, crucially, link pages together in my personal vault. This is an invaluable way to link a story to its notes and any other assets that go along with it. Unfortunately, Markdown isn’t universally supported. I can use it on Weasyl, SubscribeStar, Mastodon, and Discord; I can’t use it on FurAffinity, SoFurry, InkBunny, or Telegram. If I want to have the story appear with its proper formatting on all sites and minimize the number of versions I have to post, it still turns into a heck of a production.
Once I finish editing a story and it’s ready to post, here’s what all I have to do.

• Export the story as a PDF and as HTML.
• Copy the Markdown file, remove any frontmatter, and rename it to a TXT file.
• Make a story thumbnail using Krita. I have a template so this only takes a couple minutes.
• Post the story and its thumbnail to SubscribeStar Adult. The way PostyBirb handles SSA sometimes mangles text formatting in ways I can’t fix.
• Post the story to my early access channel on Discord. PostyBirb works here, at least.
• Use the PDF in PostyBirb to post to FurAffinity and SoFurry. The HTML version of the story gets added to the description on FA and the fallback text used on SoFurry.
• Use the TXT in PostyBirb to post to Weasyl and InkBunny.
• Confirm that I want to use the thumbnail I provided on Weasyl.
• Copy the BBcode from FurAffinity into the story text on InkBunny. Yes, really. This is actually necessary.
• If posting to Mastodon, copy the Markdown and paste it into the site(s) I’m posting to. PostyBirb doesn’t format Mastodon posts since formatting isn’t vanilla behavior.
• Collect the links from the various sites that the story was posted on.
• Post to my Telegram channel with the links to the story.
• Post to various self-promotion channels on Discord with links to the story.
• Hope that I haven’t somehow missed a step along the way and nervously recheck everything to ensure it was all done properly.

So, there you have it. Posting a picture to half a dozen pages takes just a few moments, depending on how thoroughly I tag and describe it. Posting a story to the same number of sites is a 15+ minute ordeal that involves a lot of manual, error-prone steps. I’d welcome any improvements to that workflow, because it is genuinely a big part of why I haven’t kept up with posting stories despite having nearly a dozen in my backlog now. Otherwise, I’m just going to have to power through, get things scheduled, and at least take some solace in knowing I’ll have posts up for most weeks remaining in the year.

Posted using PostyBirb