Writer success stories make me happy, especially when they’re huge and hugely unexpected.
Meet Jeff Kinney.
Jeff wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist. Although the University of Maryland, College Park’s daily newspaper featured a comic strip he’d created, the job offers didn’t exactly pile up after graduation. Instead, the rejection letters did.
He needed a different approach if he wanted his cartoons to be seen. I’m guessing a paycheck was also something of a priority. So, he took a day job at Pearson Education, developing games for their website. At night, he worked on his Diary of a Wimpy Kid children’s novel, written as a funny, handwritten (rather than typed) journal and illustrated, naturally, with his cartoons.
He worked on that children’s novel, which follows middle-schooler Greg Heffley, for eight years. At least one draft reached 1,300 pages. Yikes!
Finally, he published his book online. Within a year, he had attracted some 12 million followers. A visit to the New York Comic Con, sample in hand, landed him an editor and a multi-book publishing contract with Abrams Books. The first printed children’s novel was published in April 2007 to monstrous acclaim. Two years later, Time magazine listed Jeff as one of the Time 100 most influential people.
Fast forward 18 years, and Jeff’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series now includes 19 novels and an activity book. Then there’s the three-book (so far) spin-off children’s novel series centering on the character Rowley Jefferson, a live-action film series produced by 20th Century that ran from 2010 to 2017, and three animated films released in the early 2020s.
As of 2020, more than 250 million copies of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid children’s novels have been sold around the world. That makes it the fourth best-selling book series of all time.
Yup. Kinney could have gotten discouraged by all those rejection letters and not chased his dream. He could have decided that he wanted to play rather than choose to work on a children’s novel for eight years. But he didn’t. And look at him now.
