Didn't succeed; tried again

Why buy a ticket, goes the old argument, when you can get in for free?

Jeff Kinney can provide you with more than a million reasons.

That's how many copies he has sold of his Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, even though the material in the two best sellers has been available online for free since 2004.

Kinney, who will be making two local appearances for readings and signings on Saturday, first published the hilarious illustrated adventures of middle schooler Greg Heffley on the kids' Web site www.funbrain.com. More than 50 million visitors have checked out Greg's jejune musings on parents, pranks and pecking order.

"I really wrung my hands over the decision to run it online to begin with," says Kinney, 37, on the phone from Boston. "I was really afraid, and rightfully so, that no publisher would want anything to do with something that had been available for free online. But I couldn't resist the audience of millions of kids online at Funbrain."

"It's like having a couple of million kids in a stadium," says Jess Brallier, publisher of the Family Education Network, which maintains Funbrain and other Web sites for kids and parents. "Whatever you put up on the jumbo screen, they're going to look at. And if you have good stuff, they will keep looking at it."

Since Kinney first collected Greg's journals into a book format last year, it's become apparent that kids don't mind double-dipping. Last week, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and its recently published sequel, Rodrick Rules, were both in the top 10 on USA Today's best-seller list.

"It's the most incredible phenomenon we've had since Harry Potter," says Hannah Schwartz, the owner of Children's Book World in Haverford. "The word-of-mouth has been amazing. Kids buy one and then they buy another and before they get halfway through that book they're back looking for a third - which won't be out until 2009. Kinney's books are short; they're smart; they're funny and they don't talk down to kids."

Indeed, the charm of Wimpy Kid is the pitch-perfect way it captures the voice of a seventh grader. Sample entry in Greg's diary: "Let me just say for the record that I think middle school is the dumbest idea ever invented. You got kids like me who haven't hit their growth spurt yet mixed in with these gorillas who need to shave twice a day."

Of course, nothing that seems that natural on the page comes without effort. "I guess I'm in touch with my juvenile self," says the author. "I spent a lot of time really trying to remember what it was like to think like a kid. What happens in most writing done by adults about kids is that usually the kid ends up acting heroically and does things only an adult would do."

Kinney, the father of two young boys, also labored to keep the experiences of his Wimpy Kid as universal as possible. "I work really hard to make the books timeless," he says. "I want to make it so this could be about a kid 20 years from now or 20 years ago. I was trying to style it in the broadest sense so that an adult or child could recognize himself in it."

One byproduct of that generic tone is that Diary is extremely well-suited to the international market, where it is being translated into 22 languages.

"In the German market, we found out they couldn't name it Diary of a Wimpy Kid because they don't have a word for wimpy, which I thought was interesting," says Kinney. "So they gave it another name, one that translates as Greg's Journals: I'm Surrounded by Idiots, which is a better title than mine."

Kinney also just signed a deal with 20th Century Fox to adapt the book into a film. Not bad for a failed cartoonist.

Growing up in Fort Washington, Md., Kinney wanted nothing so much as to be the next Bill Watterson, creator of the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip.

He had some success as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland with Igdoof, a cartoon he drew for the campus newspaper.

"I got a lot of attention," says Kinney, "and the Washington Post ran a big thing about this cartoonist who was 'on his way.' It really blew up my head, but once I got out in the real world, it turned out I wasn't on my way after all.

"I wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist more than anything," he continues. "But I couldn't get my work accepted. I submitted for three years to the cartoon syndicates. I simply didn't have the technical style to match the real pros.

"Eventually," he says, "I realized that if I drew as a seventh-grade kid, that was probably the limit of my technical skill and writing skill as well. I definitely couldn't have written the diary of a high school or college kid."

The purposefully crude style of Wimpy Kid has really struck a chord with the books' core audience, which Kinney identifies as "fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade kids."

"It always surprises me when younger kids like it as well," he says. "I feel a little conflicted when a first grader reads it. The book is supposed to appeal to a sophisticated sense of humor. They have to understand that Greg is flawed, that Greg is not a role model. He is not to be emulated or imitated."

Like his creator, Greg manages to do the best he can with what he has to work with.

"I'm not a real cartoonist," says Kinney. "Or a real writer. I feel out of place in both settings."

Yet out of that double failure has emerged a singular success.