Q&A: Mahima Sankar, Editorial Assistant, HarperCollins

For Work in Publishing Week 2025, we're sharing stories from people who are in the early years of their publishing careers. Here we catch up with Mahima Sankar, Editorial Assistant for Picture Books & Non-Fiction at HarperCollins' Farshore imprint.

What’s the story of how you found your way into publishing?

Starting university, I was fairly certain I wanted to study something related to storytelling, but I still wasn’t quite sure whether that meant literature, film, journalism or theatre (I was operating with very vague direction). I settled on filmmaking, since I liked the combination of writing and visual storytelling it afforded me.

During a script development internship with a film production company, I spent months reading speculative scripts my bosses received and writing ‘coverage’ – summing up a script and writing short briefs on whether it had creative and commercial potential – basically, a lot like reviewing manuscripts in publishing. I loved working

on those and it made me realise that I much preferred being on the writing side of storytelling than working with cameras. After that, I interned with Amar Chitra Katha Comics, a publishing company in India that specialises in historical and mythological stories – my storyboarding and visual storytelling skills from filmmaking came in surprisingly handy with the comics format.

I credit the attention to detail and content that academic papers demanded with preparing me to copyedit and write efficiently later on.

From there, months of cold emails into the void later, I managed to reach an editor with Pan Macmillan India who took a chance on my email looking for advice (subtext: a job) and that’s how I got my first paid editing gig as a freelance copyeditor. A few months and many more applications later, I got to start working where I am now, with the Picture Books and Non-Fiction team at Farshore.

What skill did you find most valuable during your first few months in publishing?

Hands down, academic research and writing. While I majored in filmmaking, the university I went to was quite research-oriented and I also minored in political science. I have a very loosey-goosey understanding of comparative politics and the other lofty things I claimed to know a lot about in my papers, but I still gained some solid research and writing skills from working on them – the pained hours I spent slogging through the library website for citations on 19th century oil drilling handily taught me a lot of what I need now to fact-check how tall dinosaurs are for kids’ books.

I credit the attention to detail and content that academic papers demanded with preparing me to copyedit and write efficiently later on; I may not have been allowed to use phrases like ‘loosey goosey’ before in academia, but it taught me how to make a point.

What’s a part of the publishing process you didn’t even realise existed before you started?

I knew rights existed as a concept, but if you had asked me before I would have assumed it centred around the occasional movie deal. I had no idea just how vital foreign language rights are to the business of publishing, and how large of a role translation plays in dispersing text-based creativity across the world. I’ve also found it interesting seeing how Rights and Sales operate in cohesion to sell to every possible market. It paints an interesting map of global linguistic diversity and cultural sensibilities when you see what sorts of books are selling and where – from which countries buy our books in English and which buy rights to translate them, to what languages they choose to use and what topics for which they have a preference or aversion.

It took buckets of rejection (or being outright ghosted) at every stage of trying to find work experience before opportunities materialised and I got this job ... the frustrating reality of it is that you’re facing a lot of competition so you can be slow to get results regardless of competence.

What one experience really stands out from your first year in publishing?

Very soon after I started at HarperCollins, the Picture Books team that I’m a part of started working on the movie companion book of the Oscar-winning animated film Flow – exciting news, especially for a former film student! Despite being fairly new to my assistant role, I got to provide a few rounds of editorial feedback on it and it felt a smidge poetic for this to be the first book here where I saw my thoughts shape parts of the story. Seeing the book on a shelf in Waterstones a few months later (pictured: me with the book I told my family I ‘basically wrote’) and opening it to see turns of phrase and photos I already knew felt really strange, but very satisfying.

What’s the best piece of unofficial advice you picked up – something no one tells you before you start?

Possibly that it’s a very good idea to fortify yourself against rejection – other people’s and your own – and criticism. When it comes to other people, reading submissions, I find it exciting that there’s so much great art out there, and a tragedy how a lot of it just won’t get made – because it isn’t commercially viable, it’s already been done, or it just isn’t what a company’s looking for. It’s a pity, but it’s going to happen, and eventually one day you might be the one saying No thanks.

On the personal front, it took buckets of rejection (or being outright ghosted) at every stage of trying to find work experience before opportunities materialised and I got this job. It can be quite demoralising, especially when you’re starting out and have no certainty that you’re doing any of the right things, but the frustrating reality of it is that you’re facing a lot of competition so you can be slow to get results regardless of competence.

Editing at its core involves looking at someone else’s work and finding ways to make it the best version of itself it can be; that often involves offering your thoughts (constructively, of course) and it’s a skill I’ve enjoyed working on.

And at every point, there’s criticism. I’d like to think that being told ‘This is the most

magnificently written BS I have ever seen’ (my professor, reading my final paper), ‘These don’t make sense’ (my cousin, examining the cover letters I’d been sending around town), and ‘It’s not as funny as you said it would be’ (my friend, reading a script I wrote) has feedback-proofed my psyche, but it’s still pretty annoying. That said, someone once told me that you have to know when to edit the paper and the cover letter, and when to tell your friend to buy a sense of humour. Criticism is what you make of it.

If your career in publishing were a book title, what would it be – and why?

The title would be Want an opinion? I quite like sharing my opinion on things and I have a sneaking suspicion that’s why I enjoy editing and reading submissions so much. Editing at its core involves looking at someone else’s work and finding ways to make it the best version of itself it can be; that often involves offering your thoughts (constructively, of course) and it’s a skill I’ve enjoyed working on.

All my work experience from script reading to publishing has involved some version of this, and I’d say it’s simply a more structured version of the same impulse I have to go on and on about, say, great cheesecake I’ve eaten or TV shows I’ve watched – just long lists of opinions and suggestions.