Kevin Leu’s book Berating Others on Your Way to a Lifetime of Happiness is raunchy and he’s proud of it. Well, until his traditional Chinese mother suggests buying several of his books to share with her friends.
“My mom wanted to buy 10 books to give to her friends. I told her, ‘I don’t think it’s a good book to give to your friends.’ It’s satire. The cover is me with my shirt off, wearing a sideways hat,” Leu says. “I’m trying to embody a douchebag. I don’t want her friends to see that and think that’s a serious depiction of me.”
But it was his mother who prompted him to write the book in the first place. Though with chapters such as “F*ck Holiday Cards and the Couples Who Send Them” and “8 Things That Guys Don’t Tell Their Girlfriends”, this book may not be the what his mom had in mind.
He’s a journalist who was smart enough to escape the industry and move into public relations. He “shed the jacket, shed the tie” and adorned the Silicon Valley jeans and t-shirt attire at a start-up where shorts and flip-flops were practically issued uniforms.
“We even had alcohol in our office,” he says.
It was his enjoyment of embodying that lifestyle and telling stories about it that led to encouragement from guys he worked with to start a blog. So he did. Silicon Valley Bachelor is a place where as he puts it, sometimes you find yourself reading it and thinking “TMI. T-M-I.”
The description for his blog pretty much sums up the type of blog it is—“Ludicrous, belligerent, irresponsible, yet tantalizingly handsome, the Silicon Valley Bachelor has been the most sought after bachelor since Steve Wozniak.”—and the type of book it turned into.
Fast forward four or five years later, he says, and he realized he had enough material to fill a book. So he did; thanks to a little pressure from his mom.
“She would see all this writing I was doing and encouraged me to write a book,” he says.
Little did she know that the more popular of his blog posts—the racier ones—were what would drive the subject of the book.
“Here you go, Ma, I finally did it,” he says he told her.
The dedication in his book reads “For only my Mom. Not you, Dad, or Sis, or anyone else. Here is that book you have been nagging me about for the last two years. Now bring me my meatloaf! NOW!”
Now, of course, she wants him to publish a serious one.
“You know how those Asian moms are; nothing’s ever good enough,” he says with a chuckle.
Leu, 33, was born in Texas and moved to Cupertino when he was about 12 or 13 and graduated from Cupertino High School, and then UC San Diego. To say he’s close with his family may be an understatement.
“I’ve got my mom calling me to see if I’ve eaten dinner yet,” he says. And his parents live just a couple of miles away.
And the amazing things his sister’s twins do, well, he thinks they’re, um, “amazing.”
The word “bachelor” in the title of his blog would lead one to believe his readers are all male, but Leu says he has just as many female readers as male, and they contribute a lot of the comments on the blog.
Though the blog is satirical he gets serious questions asked of him.
“Someone will move to the area, and write ‘Hey I’m recently divorced, what’s a good bar I should go out to?’” he says.
The character he becomes in the blog is self-deprecating, annoying and one that makes you embarrassed for him. He’s the kind of guy who thinks he is “The Most Interesting Man in the World”, but he’s not—he’s smarmy, but in a somewhat innocent way—somewhat. But his goal is to be the punch line in the end of all his schtick, which makes him “more endearing,” he says.
“It’s not my purpose to make people angry, but to make people laugh and to teach them something, too.”
His girlfriend has read parts of the book, but he’s asked her to not read certain chapters.
“Essentially I ripped out some of those pages; blacked out the contents,” Leu says.
Berating Others On Your Way To A Lifetime of Happiness: That, And Dating Around The World is available for purchase on Amazon for $5.99.
To market the book Leu has embraced social media and done some creative promotional videos. Come back to Patch to read more about Leu’s marketing ideas.
