"The books are funny and appeal to all levels of readers," says Judy Bulow, lead buyer for the children's section of the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver. "And we've seen a plethora of stories from other authors [Rachel Renee Russell's Dork Dairies, Tom Watson's Stick Dog] like that, with a lot of illustrations and clever humour. The kids eat them up. If there's not a new Wimpy Kid book, they want something like it."
Kinney, 46, is a Fort Washington, Maryland, native who studied at the University of Maryland, College Park, and while in school created a comic strip that ran in the campus newspaper. Kinney, speaking by phone near the bookstore he and his wife Julie own in Plainville, Massachusetts, recalls how Heffley had been on his mind for years before he finally got a book deal. He liked the idea of a kid defined not by heroics, but by "flaws and imperfections", not unlike what the author saw in himself.
Heffley was introduced to many in 2004 through a funbrain.com web series that Kinney published for free that attracted millions of visitors. Two years later, Kinney attended the first New York Comic-Con. He stopped by the Abrams booth, purchased a copy of Brian Fies' graphic novel Mom's Cancer and spoke to Abrams editorial director Charles Kochman, who recalls Kinney asking him if he would look at his work.
"At these shows you're constantly getting pitched stuff, and most of it is forgettable," says Kochman, who still edits Kinney. "As he handed it to me, he said, 'I have this web comic called Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and the image he showed me was the image we used for book one. I remember thinking, 'I wish something like this had been around when I was a kid'."
The series debuted in April 2007 with a first printing of 25,000 copies and early praise from Publishers Weekly, which cited Kinney's "gift for believable preteen dialogue and narration". The book was on The New York Times' best-seller list by May and remained there long after. Kinney, meanwhile, learned that his work had caught on with an unexpected audience.
"Once the book came out, I started getting emails from teachers thanking me, saying almost 95 per cent of the time, 'You got my reluctant reader to read'," Kinney says. "I had never heard that phrase before. And I found out that it was a big deal, that 'reluctant readers' was code for boys. The letters I got from kids would simply say they thought the books were funny."
According to Abrams, Kinney's next Wimpy Kid novel will find Greg on a holiday trip, although "what's billed as a stress-free vacation becomes a holiday nightmare". The author hopes to complete at least 20 in the series and likes that Heffley, unlike Harry Potter, can always stay the same age. Kinney still thinks about writing books for adults and nonfiction projects, but for fiction he is sticking with kids.
"I've learned that I'm a children's writer," he says. "I didn't know it when I was starting off, but I know it now."