Textile School publishes technical reference material for people who work in textiles: process notes, methods, standards, calculators, tables and teaching material. Contributions are welcome and are published free of charge. This page sets out what we accept, and answers – in full – the questions we are asked most often, so that you do not need to email to ask them.
Links: please read this first
Most enquiries we receive are about links, so this section comes before everything else.
- Every outbound link on this site carries
rel="nofollow"orrel="sponsored". Without exception, and including links on pages we publish ourselves. This is a site-wide technical setting, not an editorial decision taken per article, and it is not something a contributor, an agency or an advertiser can change. - There are no links in the body of an article other than citations to sources and to standards. A link to a commercial site will be removed.
- A published contributor gets one link, from the website field of their contributor profile. It is nofollow, like every other outbound link here.
- Links written into a biography do not appear. Biography text is rendered as plain text, so any HTML pasted into it is shown to readers as literal characters rather than as a link. An earlier version of this page invited anchor-text links in the author bio. That was wrong: the site has never rendered them, and the invitation should not have stood.
- We do not sell placements, and we do not buy them. We do not accept payment to publish, we pay no fee for contributions, we do not exchange links, and we do not take part in reciprocal-link arrangements. There is no price for any of these, so please do not write to ask for one.
If a link is the reason you are considering a submission, this is not the right site, and we would rather say so plainly than waste your time.
Guest posts, sponsored posts and paid links
This section exists because those are the words people search for and write to us with, and because until recently this page answered them badly.
- We do not publish guest posts in the sense the term is normally used: a supplied article whose real purpose is a link inside it. Contributions are welcome and always have been. The difference is the test – whether somebody working in textiles is better off for having read it.
- There is no rate card. We do not sell sponsored posts, paid placements, advertorials, link insertions or niche edits. No figure changes this, so a message asking what we charge is asking a question with no answer.
- Nothing here is do-follow. Every outbound link carries nofollow or sponsored, site-wide, set in code rather than decided per article. A backlink from this site passes no ranking signal at all, which makes a campaign aimed at one a waste of your budget as well as our time.
- We do not add supplied sections to existing articles. If your company belongs in one of our comparisons, say so and give us something checkable. We will look, and where you do belong we will write the entry ourselves, in our own words. We do not publish your copy as our judgement.
- Unsolicited pitches do not get a reply, and neither do the follow-ups. That is not rudeness. This page is the reply, and it is a fuller one than anybody here would type out.
An earlier version of this page invited three anchor-text links in the author biography. That invitation was wrong when it was written – the site has never rendered links in a biography – and it is withdrawn here. If you are reading this because a search told you the site accepts “write for us” submissions on those terms, the page that told you so was ours, and this one replaces it.
What we are looking for
Material that a working textile professional or a student could not easily assemble for themselves. Articles, research summaries, lecture notes, worked methods, comparison tables, book reviews and reference material are all in scope, across any part of the industry – fibre, spinning, weaving, knitting, wet processing, garmenting, testing, sustainability, costing and machinery.
Articles should be at least 750 words. There is no fixed maximum, though most sit between 1,000 and 2,500 words. Length is not the measure; specificity is. A short piece that gives real numbers, tolerances, test conditions or a reproducible method is worth more to us than a long one that surveys a topic in general terms.
If you work for a manufacturer, supplier or vendor
You are welcome to contribute. Some of the most useful technical writing in this industry comes from people who build and run the machinery, and we would rather have that expertise on the site than exclude it. Six conditions apply:
- Declare the affiliation when you submit. It is published on your contributor profile and, where it is relevant to the subject, noted on the article.
- The article must stand up if a competitor’s product is substituted into it. Methods, test conditions and comparison frameworks are welcome. Named product recommendations, performance claims about your own range, and sales language are not.
- Your link is the same nofollow profile link everyone else gets. Affiliation does not earn an extra one, and being non-promotional in the body does not buy one either.
- Claims about test results need their conditions. A number without the method, the sample and the conditions that produced it will be cut.
- The substitution test applies to features, not only to names. A general guide that quietly assumes a component only your own range carries is a product placement with the product name taken out. If a construction detail is in the article because you sell it rather than because the subject needs it, it comes out. If the article is genuinely about that detail, then it is an article about your product category, and we would rather write that one ourselves.
- A person writes it, and that person is the byline. We do not publish a company as an author, a name supplied on a company’s behalf, or an agency byline. We need someone who can answer a question about a method and stand behind the answer. Tell us their role, and how to reach them.
Products sold on a health claim
A number of textile products are sold on a physiological benefit rather than on a textile property: grounding and earthing bedding, far-infrared and “bio-ceramic” fabrics, negative-ion finishes, copper and silver wellness textiles, EMF-shielding clothing. How those fabrics are constructed, finished and tested is ordinary textile engineering, and we are glad to carry it – conductive yarn, surface resistivity, wash durability of a coating, the standards that measure any of it.
The retail claim is a separate thing, and for most of these categories the published evidence does not carry it. So we publish the engineering and we do not publish the category’s marketing, including at one remove. An article that makes no health claim anywhere in its text, but whose purpose is to put a supplier of these products in front of a technical readership, is that marketing. Where the subject is the product category itself, we would rather write it here, with the state of the evidence in it.
What a biography is
Two or three sentences: who you are, what you do, where you do it, and the one website address that becomes your profile link. It is rendered as plain text, so write prose and not markup.
What does not survive editing: a list of what your company manufactures, the market segments it serves, an invitation to request samples, quotations, catalogues or specifications, and a closing line addressed to buyers. Those belong on your own site, which is what the profile link is for. Where the biography is only those things, there is nothing left to publish the article under, and we will ask you for a real one before anything goes up.
AI-assisted drafting
Permitted, with one requirement: a named person with genuine domain knowledge must take responsibility for the piece and must have verified every technical claim, figure and citation in it against a source they can name. Tell us at submission if a draft was AI-assisted. We are not policing the tool; we are asking who is accountable for the content being correct.
Submissions that are evidently generated end-to-end and unreviewed are declined. They are easy to spot: plausible structure, confident numbers, and sources that do not say what they are cited as saying.
Consider contributing data instead
If you represent a manufacturer, an organiser or a standards body, an article is often not the most useful thing you can give us, and a register entry is. These are structured, credited, and read by people looking for exactly that information:
- Machinery. Correct a specification, add a model, or claim your company’s entries in the machinery register at /machinery/claim/.
- Events. Submit a trade fair, conference or training event to the events calendar.
- Standards and regulations. Report a superseded, withdrawn or newly published standard we are carrying incorrectly.
The same link policy applies to register entries. What differs is that the information is genuinely wanted, is kept current, and is attributed to the organisation that supplied it.
How to submit
Send your submission through the contact form. Please do not send a pitch asking whether we accept contributions – this page is the answer. Send the draft, or a short outline with the specific method or data it will contain.
Include:
- Title (up to 80 characters) and an optional sub-title (up to 128 characters)
- A summary of up to 250 characters
- At least three keywords
- The body text, with headings, tables and lists marked up as you want them to appear
- References: title, source and link for each
- Images, charts and diagrams as separate attachments, with a marker in the text showing where each belongs. Tell us the source and licence of every image; we cannot publish one whose rights are unclear. We do not source images for a submission – a note that a suitable licensed picture “may be used” is not an image, and an article that arrives without one is published without one.
- A short biography, your affiliation, and the one website address for your profile – written as the section above describes, because a biography that is a sales paragraph delays publication while we ask for another one
Plain text, Markdown or a Word document are all fine. A scanned or photographed handwritten article is also accepted.
Copyright
The work must be your own and you must hold the rights to it, including the rights to any images. It may have appeared elsewhere in print or online. By submitting, you grant Textile School the right to publish it here; you keep the copyright, and you may republish it yourself.
Editing and publication
We edit for spelling, grammar and house style, and may adjust a title so that readers can find the piece. Substantive changes are put back to you first. Technical material may be checked against the standard or source it cites, and we will come back with questions where a figure cannot be reconciled.
Published articles are listed on your contributor profile alongside anything else you have written for us. We do not guarantee publication, and we do not always give a reason for declining.