Major College Textbook Publishers That Hire Freelance Curriculum Writers

College textbook publishers have a great need for freelance writers to develop curriculum components such as test questions, quiz questions, lecture outlines, instructor manuals and student study guides. My ebook Writing College Textbook Supplements, third edition, describes in detail how to create these ancillary materials, and how to get hired by college textbook publishers and also by the education content management companies that frequently handle the larger projects for the publishers.

This post covers the major college textbook publishers that have the greatest need for supplement writers. Changes occur frequently in the publishing world, so do a web search on a particular publisher or imprint if these more general web addresses don’t get you the results you need.

College Textbook Publishers and Imprints

I list the parent company and then the main individual imprints of those companies, where relevant. Visit the parent company website to see which imprints cover disciplines in which you are qualified to work, or to find the disciplines directly. See Chapter 3, “Getting Assignments,” in my ebook for all the details on how to get freelance writing projects with textbook publishers. Note that Pearson Education, Cengage, and McGraw-Hill are the largest publishers and thus present the greatest freelance writing opportunities for curriculum development.

Cengage (formerly Thomson Learning)

• Brooks-Cole
• Course Technology
• Delmar
• Gale
• Heinle
• Schirmer
• South-Western
• Wadsworth

Jones and Bartlett Learning

MacMillan Learning

• Bedford/St. Martins
• W.H. Freeman
• Worth Publishers

McGraw-Hill Higher Education

McGraw-Hill higher education covers most academic subjects. Search the website by specific discipline. You’ll also find:

• Dushkin McGraw-Hill
• Irwin McGraw-Hill
• Primis Custom Publishing

Oxford University Press

Pearson Publishing

• Addison-Wesley
• Allyn & Bacon
• Benjamin Cummings
• Longman
• Merrill
• Prentice Hall

Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group

John Wiley and Sons

W. Norton Company

Education Content Management Companies

Many of these publishers have moved away from directly hiring and managing supplement/ancillary writers. Instead, they now contract with education content management companies to do this for them. Finding work with these companies is also covered in my ebook, and you can find a detailed list of them here.