This dissertation studies the role of the author of course books for English language teaching. In order to examine how this professional performs his / her work and what kind of influence his / her actions have on the final product, several questions are investigated: 1) What distinguishes an author of a course book from authors of other genres?; 2) When the course book aims at teaching a foreign language what methodologies and ideological aspects are involved?; 3) In the case of an English language course book, what particularities characterize the process of designing the book (Howatt & Widdonson, 2004)?; 4) Does the creation process for this kind of material constitute a more individual or a more collective kind of work? (Barthes, 1977; Foucault, 1979)?; 5) In individual or collective terms, how does the author´s subjectivity and identity take shape throughout the creation of his work (Barthes, 1977; Bakhtin, 1993; Ivanic, 1998)?. The corpus includes questionnaires answered by different authors in the field who work in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The data collected were complemented by recorded interviews. The findings of this research indicate that, in terms of production, the author´s contribution to English as a foreign language course books is marked by intertextual references and the dissolution of the belief in the individual genius of the author.