Jeff Kinney marks 10th anniversary of Wimpy Kid series
NEW YORK — Jeff Kinney remembers when his goal was to write a book, one big book, for grown-ups.
“I thought I’d write about a year in the life of a typical kid,” says the children’s author known to millions for his Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. “I’d write one book that was between 700 and 1,000 pages long and I’d look at every aspect of childhood within that time frame. Furthermore, I was writing for the humor section of the bookstore, not the middle grade section.”
The first 11 novels have sold more than 180 million copies and the series has been the basis for four movies, with the latest, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul, scheduled for May 19.
Abrams Books announced on Wednesday that the 12th book, coming on Nov 7, will be called Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Getaway.
The misadventures of middle schooler Greg Heffley, sketched in readers’ minds as a skinny boy with a round head and precious few strands of hair, have stood out in two ways in the book world they appeal equally to girls and boys, and they have consistently sold more than 1 million copies in hardcover.
“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 like that, with a lot of illustrations and clever humor. 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 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.
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”. 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 percent 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.”
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.”