ABSTRACT The National Textbook and Didactic Material Program in Brazil is responsible for evaluating, purchasing, and distributing textbooks for basic education. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges this program faces is the alignment between the textbook idealized by the public policy and the textbook aimed by the publishers. Whereas the public policy and the authors usually aim at educational quality, publishers target at sales. Publishers tend to set quality aside assuming teachers choose titles for adoption based on easiness to use rather than on pedagogical quality. This article analyzes the discourse of one of the authors of a textbook for the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language in Brazilian basic education. The aim is to understand how the author's and publisher's wishes have led to the final production made available to teachers and students. The analysis considers the specificities of the Program, the characterization of textbooks as socio-historical-cultural objects, and the Bakhtin Circle's conceptions of language and authorship. The results show the textbook authorship (author-creator) is the product of power relations among the so-called authors (author-persons) and institutional forces which play decisive roles in authorship (author-institutions).