Covers story: why are there so many new publishing imprints?

From Colm Tóibín’s Tuskar Rock to Fleet, One and Tinder Press, there seem to be more and more publisher subdivisions. Claire Armitstead finds out why

Towards the end of the noughties, Colm Tóibín bounced into the office of a London publisher clutching a fat Australian novel and insisting that he had to bring it to the UK. His enthusiasm for what he would later acclaim as a book “of immense power and scope, reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Don DeLillo’s Underworld” caused some surprise at Atlantic Books, which was among the 80-odd publishers that had already rejected Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap.

But Tóibín persevered - and the novel, which had already been out for two years in Australia – became the literary talking point of 2010: loved and reviled with equal passion, this yarn about a falling-out over an unruly child at a suburban barbecue was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and went on to be made into two TV mini-series.

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