At Redgate, we’re always keen on publishing new and interesting views and ideas. We try to keep coming up with fresh ways of presenting information, so if you have something original to say, we’d like to hear from you.
Subject matter for Redgate resources like Simple Talk, the Redgate blog or Redgate Product Learning will generally be chosen because it will interest professional IT people in businesses. Although we like to feature technologies and tools, we’re also interested in issues around how and why technology is adopted and used, such as DevOps, data privacy and protection, and the challenges different industry sectors face.
Our articles come from a whole range of writers. Many IT professionals, for example, submit articles to us for publication which contain ideas and insights from their day-to-day work and experiences. Sometimes, our eye is caught by exceptional writing on a blog or forum, and we ask the author if they’d like to contribute. Quite often, we meet potential authors at one of the many conferences we attend.
We also use professional writers so as to get a good mix. However, we believe that people who work with the technologies they write about can explain technical matters precisely and with relevance, often in ways impossible to professional trainers. We like to encourage them and to this aim we:
- Help authors by editing, guiding and mentoring submissions in order to provide articles of consistent quality that people want to read
- Feature finished articles in newsletters that goes out to over 200,000 recipients
- Promote content through social media and on other websites
We want to make absolutely sure that all the articles we publish will be well-received. For this reason, we put articles through a fairly rigorous process. They go through a technical review and a technical edit, and we sometimes ask authors to do substantial revisions for their second draft. When the author submits a second draft we will do a final edit, which includes a copy edit.
This allows us to ensure the articles are correct, cover the subject, conform to certain rules that make them easier to read and understand, and are of the highest quality we can achieve. We have a group of volunteer technical reviewers who help out with peer-reviews, and we frequently call on Redgate staff for a second opinion.
All authors submit their articles in Word format, so we can track changes and allow authors to accept or reject our revisions. It also allows peer-reviewers and editors to add comments. We then set the articles ready for publication and schedule them. At this stage, we usually check the article as it will appear with the author.
In exchange for your work in writing for us, we can offer you:
- Exposure – your content is published on Simple Talk, the Redgate blog or Product Learning
- Recognition – we include a short bio for each author
- Traffic – reciprocal link to your site or blog
- Formatting and editing of the submitted content
We place extra demands on authors who write for Simple Talk, where articles are generally longer and go into far more detail. In return, we pay for articles which appear on the site, the payment depending on length, technical depth and complexity.
The time between the submission of the first draft and publication can vary between two weeks and several months, depending on the extent of revisions required and the number of articles we currently have in the pipeline.
If you would like to share your programming experience or specialized expertise of a particular area, then please contact us. We’re always keen to find IT professionals, SQL Server developers and administrators, Exchange or SharePoint Administrators, and .NET developers who are willing to share their hard-won knowledge.
Before you submit an article, please make sure that it is your original work and has not been published elsewhere. By this, we mean that you have not copied code, images, or text from a book, article or post by someone else.
Write for Simple Talk
Simply send an email to editor@simple-talk.com, telling us what you would like to write about, and a little about yourself and your experience. We’re looking for highly knowledgeable, in-depth articles about technologies and processes related to SQL Server, development, and the cloud.
Write for the Redgate blog
Send an email to blog@red-gate.com, giving us some details about your experience and the kind of articles you’d like to write. Rather than deep dives into technology, the blog features shorter posts about topics like introducing DevOps to the database, and the challenges companies face with data privacy and protection.
Write for Redgate Product Learning
If you’ve worked out how to solve a technical challenge, and the solution includes one or more Redgate tool, or you want to share a quick tip explaining a smart way to use a tool or feature, then drop an email to tony.davis@redgate.com, explaining briefly what you’d like to write about, and why, and who you consider to be the main target audience.
Find out more about writing
For more hints on writing for Redgate, see the following articles.
The Simple Talk Author’s Style Guide
Every article that is published on Simple Talk gets edited. With books, the editorial process is even more rigorous. What are the editors up to? Really, it is just checking that what is written conforms with our house rules.
On Simple Talk, we like to have some book reviews. Unlike articles, we cannot pay for book reviews, but neither does Amazon. If you fancy reviewing a technical book on SQL Server, .NET or PowerShell, then Simple Talk is a platform which will guarantee your review will be widely read.
How to write an interesting technical article
The very best technical writers take enormous pains to present information in an interesting way. This isn’t a mysterious art at all, and the technique can be learned in the same way journalists are taught. We give just a few pointers.
How to write a blog post that gets read
There is a fairly simple and easily-learned technique to writing a blog post that people will want to read. We asked a widely-read anonymous blogger how it is done.
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