Below is the complete list of Jeff Kinney books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Diary of a Wimpy Kid Books
- The Third Wheel (2012)
Published in 2012, The Third Wheel is listed as book #7 in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. 
Publication Order of Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid Books
Publication Order of Wimpy Kid Non-Fiction Books
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas Books
About Jeff Kinney
Jeff Kinney is an American author, cartoonist, and game designer whose illustrated Diary of a Wimpy Kid books reshaped contemporary children’s publishing. Born in Maryland in 1971 and raised in the Washington, D.C., area, he attended the University of Maryland, where he created a comic strip called Igdoof for the student newspaper. Kinney initially hoped to become a syndicated newspaper cartoonist, but his inability to break into that field ultimately pushed him toward a different form: stories that combined prose with simple cartoon drawings and allowed the words and images to share the joke.
That experiment developed into Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Kinney spent years working on the concept before it became a conventional print series, first presenting Greg Heffley’s story online. The first published book appeared in 2007 and introduced a middle-school narrator who insists he is keeping a journal rather than a diary. Greg was a striking alternative to the earnest or heroic child protagonists common in children’s fiction. He is ambitious, self-absorbed, insecure, frequently dishonest with himself, and remarkably capable of misunderstanding why his plans fail. Kinney’s comedy depends on the distance between Greg’s version of events and what readers can see actually happening.
The series developed through books including Rodrick Rules, The Last Straw, Dog Days, and many later installments, making Greg’s family, best friend Rowley Jefferson, school life, and recurring humiliations familiar to readers across generations. Kinney has resisted aging Greg out of middle school, allowing the books to function through a flexible comic continuity rather than a realistic year-by-year chronology. By 2025, the main sequence had reached its twentieth installment, Partypooper, an unusually long run for a children’s series still written and illustrated by its creator.
Kinney’s visual style is central to that durability. The drawings are deliberately spare, but they are not decorative additions to finished prose. A picture may contradict Greg’s narration, reveal a detail he ignores, or deliver the final beat of a joke. This integration of text and cartoons helped make the books accessible to children who might resist dense conventional novels while giving the humor a rhythm closer to comic strips and animation.
The Wimpy Kid world later expanded through books narrated by Rowley Jefferson. Beginning with Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid: Rowley Jefferson’s Journal, these works shift perspective from Greg’s self-justifying voice to Rowley’s more innocent outlook. Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Adventure and Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories further explore that alternative voice, showing how differently the same fictional friendship can appear depending on who controls the story.
Kinney’s career also extends beyond books. He created Poptropica, the online game world launched in 2007, bringing his interests in visual storytelling, interactive design, and children’s entertainment into another medium. Diary of a Wimpy Kid itself became a major screen franchise through live-action and animated adaptations, with Kinney increasingly involved in bringing the property to film.
Away from the page and screen, Kinney and his wife own An Unlikely Story, an independent bookstore in Plainville, Massachusetts, where he has made his home in New England. His bibliography is concentrated rather than widely dispersed across unrelated genres: the continuing Greg Heffley books, the Rowley-centered companion series, activity and behind-the-scenes volumes, and related Wimpy Kid material form the core of his publishing career. What distinguishes that body of work is the consistency of its comic perspective. Kinney built an international children’s franchise not around a heroic child but around a deeply imperfect one whose confidence almost always exceeds his judgment—and whose failures remain funny because readers understand more about him than he understands about himself.