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Publish to Blog

Publish your draft to your publication's blog.

Publish to Blog

Once you are happy with a draft, you can publish it to your publication’s blog in just a few clicks. The Publish modal handles everything — selecting a destination, setting up your slug and SEO fields, and pushing the post live.

Opening the Publish modal

From any writing session, click the Publish button in the draft panel. This opens the Publish modal where you configure all the details before your post goes live.

Choose a publication

The Publications section at the top of the modal lists all the publications you have created. Select the one you want to publish to by clicking its name. If the writing session was started from a specific publication, that publication is pre-selected for you automatically.

Slug

Hot Metal auto-generates a URL slug from your post title. For example, a post titled “10 Tips for Better Writing” becomes 10-tips-for-better-writing. You can edit the slug to anything you like before publishing.

Your published post will be available at your-publication.hotmetalapp.com/your-slug.

If you generated a featured image during your writing session, a preview of it appears in the modal. The image will be used as the post’s hero image and in social sharing cards. If you did not generate one, the modal shows a “No featured image” placeholder — you can always go back and generate one before publishing.

SEO fields

Hot Metal uses AI to auto-generate several SEO fields as soon as you open the Publish modal. You will see a loading indicator next to each field while the AI works. Once generated, the fields are fully editable — tweak them however you like before publishing.

  • Hook — A short, attention-grabbing opening sentence. The AI generates this from your draft’s content.
  • Excerpt — A brief summary used for meta descriptions and post previews. Also AI-generated from your draft.
  • Tags — Comma-separated keywords relevant to your post. The AI suggests tags based on your content, and you can add, remove, or change them freely.

All three fields display an AI badge when they contain AI-generated text.

Author

The author field is pre-filled with the default author from your selected publication’s settings. You can change it to any name you want for this specific post.

Publishing your post

When everything looks good, click the Publish button at the bottom of the modal. Hot Metal publishes your post to your publication’s site and you will see a success confirmation banner at the top of the modal.

Your post is now live at your-publication.hotmetalapp.com/your-slug.

Publishing to social media at the same time

The Publish modal also includes sections for LinkedIn and X (Twitter). You can expand those sections and publish to multiple destinations at once — your blog post and social media shares go out together in a single action.

Next steps