Kinney advocates that kids should spend time reading as an alternative to screen time. In May 2015, Kinney and his wife Julie opened 'An Unlikely Story,' a local bookstore and cafe in Plainville, Massachusetts. Over 250 million copies of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books have sold globally as of 2020 and the series was developed into feature films for which Kinney served as executive producer. He also created the kid-friendly website Poptropica which includes two islands called 'Wimpy Wonderland' and 'Wimpy Boardwalk', where the Diary of a Wimpy Kid characters and events are featured in the Poptropica universe. Kinney works full-time as a writer and illustrator. Kinney at a book signing event in Israel, 2016 He worked on his book for almost eight years, before showing it to a publisher in New York City, U.S.A The website made daily entries until June 2005.

In May 2004, FunBrain and Jeff Kinney released an online version of the story, titled Diary of a Wimpy Kid. In January 1998, Kinney brought up the idea of a middle-school weakling named Greg Heffley, who writes illustrated stories about his personal life. In 2021 he was inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa as an alumnus of the University of Maryland. Kinney graduated from the University of Maryland in 1993, originally majoring in computer science but switching to criminal justice in order to have more time to work on his comic. It was in college that Kinney created a popular comic strip, Igdoof, which ran in the school student newspaper, The Diamondback. He attended the University of Maryland, College Park in the early 1990s. He has an older brother and sister, and a younger brother.

Kinney attended Potomac Landing Elementary School and later Bishop McNamara High School, where he graduated in 1989. Jeff Kinney was born and raised in Fort Washington, Maryland.

The Long Haul by Jeff Kinney