Hi Jim,

Unfortunately, you have to publish the post first in order to send any form of email notification. But you can disable notifications for the first time its published and also unpublish the post after.

Here's what you can try.

1. Disable new post notifications here: https://www.screencast.com/t/mhevP2zuNsR
You may enable the 'Notify Administrators On New Posts' setting so that the email will still be sent to site admins.
2. Create and publish a post
3. Unpublish the post right after.
4. After this, you can still send out notifications for the unpublished post by clicking on this button at the backend(https://www.screencast.com/t/BLJZW98rlzt). It will send out emails to users based on the notification setting from step 1.