SQLServerCentral accepts articles, scripts and questions from anyone who would like to contribute. We get through a lot of content – we publish a new article every weekday, so we rely heavily on the SQL community to provide us with articles, scripts, quiz questions and blogs.
Writing is a great way to raise your profile, and potentially give your career a boost. It's also something that requires hard work and a capacity to take feedback and criticism and to use that to write better in future. In short: develop skills, impress peers, gain recognition.
Most articles find their way into the daily newsletter, which currently sends to over 100,000 people.
You can submit the following content for publication:
We pay for articles (or Stairways), but not questions, scripts, or blogs. If you want to inquire about payment for a series of questions, please contact us at articles@sqlservercentral.com.
We do not accept plagiarized and have limits on AI usage in articles. Each of these is discussed below.
We expect any work submitted for publication is the author's own work, in their own words. Copying text from any other site, blog, documentation, book, or other source is considered a violation of our plagiarism policy. We will not publish this content, and we will remove it if discovered. Authors plagiarizing others will be banned.
You can use a sentence from another source, but anything longer needs to be cited with a link or credit mark. You can copy up to a paragraph with attribution, but beyond that, the content should be your own written word.
We do not accept any non-attributed AI (Artificial Intelligence) generated text in articles at SQL Server Central for publication. The editors will use tools to determine if the likelihood of AI-generated content is high enough to reject submissions.
We have two categories of content that we apply to AI and content: AI-generated and AI-assisted. The definitions of these are below, based on the Amazon Kindle author policy:
While we do not allow AI to generate substantial parts of blogs and articles that we publish, we do allow the use of AI tools for creating setup code and data, but for substantive text and code that solves a problem or teaches a concept, this should be created by the author.
Authors are free to use AI in the same manner as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc., but are required to write articles in their own words. Any content generated (including code and data) using AI needs to be attributed just like if you copied it from any other book or website.
The use of AI assistance with grammar and spelling is beyond the intent of this policy. The use of tools such as Grammarly, Wordtune, etc., or the tools built into word processing software does not use other people’s work as a source, so these tools are fully allowable under this policy.
We regularly use AI-assisted technology to edit documents, check content for correctness, plagiarism, and AI-generated text, to ensure the content is of the highest quality.
We accept articles on any SQL topic, but a list of articles that we're looking for in particular can be found here.
Articles should be a decent length, but focused. We are looking for depth and clarity here about a specific topic that teaches a technical skill or solution to a problem. A few paragraphs are not enough. Articles will be edited, and anything that is submitted without being proofread first will not be accepted (this is especially important if English is not your first language).
Articles are paid at a rate of US$150 per article, paid at the beginning of the month following publication. Regular authors are sometimes paid more and once you have published 10 articles, feel free to email the editor and inquire about a regular series. See payment below for more details.
Anyone can submit a script. If you've got a script that you rely on, and you think others would find it useful, you can submit it through the admin area. We don't pay for scripts.
The Question of the Day is exactly that – a short, multiple-choice question that nets you some points for your SSC profile. It appears in the newsletter each day. We don't pay for these, but if you think you have the right question to stump the SSC community, submit one here.
We also syndicate blogs to the site. If you have a SQL-related blog you'd like to see appearing on SQLServerCentral, contact webmaster@sqlservercentral.com with the following details, and we will look to see if it fits the site.
We will need:
We don't pay for blogs, but we also don't edit them or make many demands. Blogs should be in English, and we are more likely to accept the blog for syndication if you publish regularly.
We sometimes highlight featured posts on the site. If this is the case with one of your posts, you will receive an email with a publication date in it, which in this case means the day it's highlighted on the site and in the newsletter.
The Stairway Series are designed to be a comprehensive series of articles on a single, narrow topic with SQL Server. The hope is that they can take you from being a relative novice to someone with a very strong grounding in that subject.
We commission Stairway Series articles from established authors.
We process payments once a month, usually in the first week of the month for all articles published the previous month. There are no exceptions to this – with the volumes of payments that have to be made, we don't have the capacity to process any separately.
Please be sure you have an email for Paypal, a physical, snail mail address for cheque, or email for Amazon in your profile. Please also specify which you prefer. Use the Profile link in the upper right and the "Edit Profile" link to change this. There is a payment section in the edit form.
SQLServerCentral does not ask for copyright to your work. You retain copyright, but give us the distribution or publication rights on this site in perpetuity. You also give us the right to publish the information in print in any of our publications. No additional royalties are paid for this, but you will receive credit and 2 copies of the publication.
This does mean, however that anything you submit is your original work. No plagiarism will be tolerated. If you're unsure, credit or reference any materials you've used in writing your article. This also applies to images. If you want to reuse something to provide clarity, be sure that you provide a reference and credit to the source.
We do not accept, nor publish, AI generated articles.
We ask for 30 days exclusive distribution rights on anything that we pay for, as well as perpetual publication rights. After the 30 days is up you are free to submit your article elsewhere, but it will still be live on SQLServerCentral in perpetuity. We also accept articles published elsewhere, but it is your responsibility to ensure that this does not conflict with the rights of the original publisher. We do not pay for these articles.
Anything you write for SSC will be handled through the contribution center. Please make sure to read the author guidelines before you add your first submission.
When you've chosen a topic, written it up and submitted your article, it goes into a submission queue for us to review. Depending on workload, events we're attending, etc., this can take 3-4 weeks. It is usually quicker, but if you don't hear back quickly, your work hasn't vanished.
If the editor has questions of comments, or the article requires substantial revision, it will be set to ‘reviewed' status, and you will receive an email informing you of this. If you return to the contribution center, you will see comments inline on your article informing you of what needs to be done.
Once the article is ready and the editor is happy with it, it will be set to ‘accepted'. It will then move into our publication queue. After this it will be scheduled, and you will receive another notification. We schedule articles weeks in advance, so it may still take a few weeks before your article is published.
If you find a mistake or need to change something, you can edit your piece in the admin area and resubmit it. We will give priority to those items in editing.