Despite glowing reviews and extensive press attention, Michael Weinreb's year-in-the-life examination of a top Brooklyn high school chess team, Kings of New York, flopped in bookstores. The February 2007 hardcover was, according to Gotham Books publisher Bill Shinker, one of the Penguin imprint's best reviewed books of the year and one of its biggest underperformers. So what's the fix in paperback? Shinker and his staff are hoping that all the book needs is a little cosmetic surgery.
When Kings comes out in January, it will have a new title and a new jacket. “It didn't sell, so we had to face the hard reality and see if we could do something else,” Shinker said of the refurbished edition. Penguin's thinking is that the hardcover jacket—which featured a close-up of a chess board in play—failed to show that the book is about kids, and that the title didn't communicate that the book is about chess.
The new version has been crowned Game of Kings and the cover now features a teenager with chess pawns in the background. Shinker hopes the revisions will “reposition the book in a more direct way.” The paperback, being released to coincide with the New York State Chess Final and the National Championship, has a new afterword and also touts something the hardcover didn't have: lots of great press blurbs.
