My Newsletter Showed Up in Kit as One Long Paragraph

I opened a draft PodGlue had written for me in Kit and it was one enormous paragraph. Every line run together. No breaks between thoughts, no spacing, nothing.

The writing itself was good. It just looked like someone had held down delete on every blank line.

And the annoying part is what that costs. The whole point of PodGlue writing the newsletter is that you open it, read it over, and send it. If the first thing you have to do is spend ten minutes putting the paragraphs back in, you might as well have written it yourself.

What was going on

PodGlue writes the newsletter as plain text. Blank line, new paragraph, the way you'd type it in a notes app.

Kit's editor expects the email body in a different shape. In that shape, a blank line doesn't mean anything. It's just empty space, and it gets thrown away.

So PodGlue was handing Kit something perfectly formatted in one language, and Kit was reading it in another. Neither side was broken. Nothing errored. The draft was created, Kit said yes, everything looked successful, the email just arrived flattened.

That's the kind of bug that can sit there a long time. There's no red warning anywhere. You only find it by opening the actual draft and looking at it.

What I found on the way

The preview inside PodGlue looked correct the whole time. Same words, proper paragraphs. That's what told me the writing was never the problem, only the handoff.

Then I noticed something worse. The episode link at the bottom, the "listen to the full episode" line, wasn't clickable. It was sitting there as text. In an email whose main job is to send people to the episode, the link to the episode didn't work.

Same root cause. Same fix.

What it does now

Paragraphs stay paragraphs. Bulleted lists come through as actual lists instead of a run-on sentence with dots in it. Your sign-off sits on its own, not welded to the last line of the email. And the episode and show links are real links you can click.

Open the draft, read it, hit send. That's the whole thing.

It also can't be tricked into doing something strange by the writing itself, if an episode is about HTML or code and the copy contains angle brackets, they show up as characters on the page, not as instructions.

Then I found the worse one

With the paragraphs fixed, I opened the next draft and actually read it properly. Near the bottom, where the link to the episode should have been, it said this:

Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Deborah Heiser here: [EPISODE_URL]

Not a link. The word [EPISODE_URL], sitting there in square brackets.

That's a placeholder. PodGlue writes it deliberately and swaps in the real address later, and for the email going into Kit, the swap wasn't happening.

This one bothered me more than the formatting, because of how it fails. A wall of text is obviously broken, you'd never send it. But a draft that reads beautifully, with one dead link three-quarters of the way down? You skim it, it looks great, you hit send. And the one thing the email was for, getting people to the episode, doesn't work.

Two smaller things turned up in the same pass. Some drafts had the subject line typed out again as the first line of the body, right underneath the actual subject field. And the preview text, that grey line your subscribers see next to the subject in their inbox, was empty on every single draft.

All three had one cause. When PodGlue already has the newsletter written, it reuses that copy instead of paying to write it twice. Sensible. But it was handing that copy straight over without the tidying-up pass the other path does. So whatever the draft happened to contain went to Kit exactly as-is.

Now it gets tidied either way: the link resolves, the repeated subject line comes off, and the preview text gets written from the first real sentence of the email rather than the "Hey everyone," at the top.

And if there's genuinely no episode link to insert, the whole sentence comes out rather than leaving you a "Listen to the full conversation here:" that goes nowhere.

What's next

The last thing on my list is how the draft arrives inside Kit's editor. Right now the whole email lands as one block, so you can't grab a paragraph and move it. The email itself is fine, it's about how Kit takes it in, but it's worth working out.

If you run your list on Kit, PodGlue now writes the newsletter for each episode and leaves it in your account as a draft, formatted, linked, ready to read. It never sends anything. That part stays yours.