My ALLi author guest this episode is Steven Leibo, an international affairs expert who spent decades teaching and commenting on global politics. In retirement, he has devoted himself to a sweeping fiction series set in the 19th century, following an American and Chinese family through major events that shaped both nations. His work blends real-world events with themes of identity, immigration, and cultural conflict.
Listen to the Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Steven Leibo
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About the Host
Author Howard Lovy has been a journalist for 40 years, and now amplifies the voices of independent author-publishers and works with authors as a developmental editor. Find Howard at howardlovy.com, LinkedIn and X.
About the Guest
Steven Leibo is an international affairs expert and former professor who spent his career studying the relationship between Asia and the West. In retirement, he now writes an epic fiction series set in the 19th century, exploring identity, immigration, and cultural change through the intertwined histories of China and America.
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Read the Transcript
Steven Leibo: Hello, my name is Steven Leibo, and I'm delighted to be on Howard's show.
My current obsession, though, for quite a number of years, is I'm the author of a family saga called the Sino-American Tales, which includes a number of different books, which is basically following a single, multi-ethnic family in terms of what's going on in the history of the late 19th century, early 20th century, in both China and with the Chinese-American community here in the United States.
I've been working on this really for years, and especially in recent years, full-time as I've retired.
Howard Lovy: Sounds like you haven't really retired.
Steven Leibo: In one sense, I've always thought this was my fantasy retirement. My career was much more diverse. I was a professor, political commentator and a writer of non-fiction works and fiction, and my image of my retirement was just to focus on historical fiction.
I think of it as a themed retirement. I would lose my mind if I didn't have something specific to do and I focused on this one thing, and to my mind it's literally a themed retirement, which I'm not sure if I made that up or not.
Howard Lovy: No, that sounds great. What's better than sitting around or just playing pickleball or whatever you're supposed to do after you retire?
Steven Leibo: From my patio, I can watch people play pickleball, so I know the possibilities; they're available right in front me.
Early Life and Education
Howard Lovy: Before we go too much into that, let's go back in time a little bit. Where did you grow up and was reading and writing always a part of your life?
Steven Leibo: Two things on that. In terms of the broader question of who I am, I am a third generation San Franciscan with all of the implications of what that means.
As a writer, I'm just one of those obsessive scribblers. I quite literally sent off and submitted my first book manuscript in 1962, and at 19 I started writing a diary, which I still have going today after all of these years.
Literally, almost a daily diary since 1969. So, yeah, I'm one of those people who is not capable of making it through a day without writing something down.
Howard Lovy: That's great. So, where did you go to college?
Steven Leibo: Actually, I started, I went to Santa Clara High School, homestead High School.
I was born in San Francisco, grew up around there, but more immediately, dead center in Silicon Valley. Went off to Foothill Community College, university of California, Santa Barbara, Washington State. A whole range of different places. Ended up on a Fulbright, living in Paris for a year for free, such a burden, studying the relationship between Asia and the west, which in some ways flowed out of my background.
If you are from San Francisco, that is your background.
Howard Lovy: Exactly, yeah.
Diverse Career Experiences
Howard Lovy: Now, you also held a wide range of jobs from shoe salesmen to fuller brush man. How did those early experiences shape you as a writer and a thinker?
Steven Leibo: You mentioned the fuller brush man and the shoe salesman, and the gas station attendant, but what people usually focus on is I spent a couple of years at Stanford interviewing people about their sex lives.
Howard Lovy: Oh.
Steven Leibo: Which is a whole other kind of interesting story, but basically because of some complications in my family background, I put myself through high school and college and ended up quite by accident, creating a professional and writing career that paralleled my own family background, which is that kind of multi-ethnic world of, frankly, again, San Francisco.
Howard Lovy: Now, I can't let you mention the Stanford interviewing people about their sex lives without asking you to elaborate a little bit on that.
Steven Leibo: Okay. The short version is, I was interviewing people about their sex life. What I was really doing, we're talking 1975-1977. Was interviewing people about the decision making associated with having themselves sterilized, tubal ligation, vasectomy. This, of course, was tied up with an interview before they did that, and about a year later, and satisfaction, of course, it was all tied up with sexuality, contraception, all those kinds of things.
Interestingly enough, the best part of this story, if you will, was I interviewed the males. I had a female partner who interviewed the females, and after they left, we would compare notes, and you couldn't tell that those couples, based on what they said, were even married to each other.
It adds to this sense of how males and females, husbands and wives, often see the world rather differently, but it was quite an experience.
Howard Lovy: I'll bet. So, what drew you into international history in politics?
Steven Leibo: People often ask me that, I grew up in a world where, really one of the most multi-ethnic cities, as we all know in America, particularly associated with Asian Western relations. I didn't know these questions were international.
They were just whoever you had lunch with or who your relatives were. I grew up in a world where I would literally go to Passover and half the people around me were Chinese.
Howard Lovy: Interesting. So, you were already an international student even before you chose that as your career?
Steven Leibo: Before I knew that was anything other than lunch companions.
From Academia to Author
Howard Lovy: So, tell me how you got started in your career and give me maybe a brief rundown of your resume before you became a full-time author.
Steven Leibo: Of course, you can't become a professor of international Asian-Western relations without being an author; you end up writing a dissertation. But my first writing, aside from the 1962 submission, which was rejected and I'm still upset about that, was a novel written for those people who were familiar with the Vietnam era in particularly California. The University of California at Santa Barbara had a confrontation with the Bank of America, with the local police, and I wrote a novel about that when I was about 21. It was terrible. It's embarrassing to read.
At the same time, I was taking classes in modern Asia and Modern West separately. This was through the bachelor's and master's degree at the University of California.
Then over time, I ended up creating my own doctoral field, which was the relationship between the two of them. So, as a non-fiction writer, books in this area, my dissertation was about a Frenchman who helped develop the naval educational development in China in the 19th century. It simply became my specialty.
And this is unusual, my dissertation, which was a biography of the Frenchmen, involved in Chinese industrialization, was found frankly by someone else, by a professor from Ohio State, to be so interesting, he suggested I completely re-write the thing as a novel. So, the book came out as a Berkeley book, academic non-fiction, and then I totally worked it around and turned it into the first novel of the Sino-American Tales: this novel about, a bit like Gone with the Wind, un-requited love in the middle of a civil war.
It was going on at the same time as our Civil War, except instead of the North and Lincoln and the Confederates, and Jefferson Davis, you had the Chinese Confucian Manchu Dynasty in the North in Beijing, and the other half was a separate parallel Chinese empire built by a gentleman who had decided he was the little brother of Jesus Christ.
Howard Lovy: Oh, wow.
Blending History and Fiction
Howard Lovy: So, you took, basically a true story and you fictionalized it. How do you go back and forth between invention and staying true to real history?
Steven Leibo: There's two issues. First of all, the suggestion was to turn my dissertation into a novel. I didn't want to be locked into the individual's personal history, so I didn't borrow his life, I borrowed his world.
Now, here again, we've got a core issue of, what is historical fiction? In my mind, what I try to do, and I heard Richard {inaudible} say this once, and I thought it was a great, I don't know if he made it up or not, that God was the best screenwriter.
I don't plot so much as I followed this family through the decades and the generations. I looked for events that happened in chronological order that I fit my characters into. So, I'm not making up a dramatic development. I put my characters that I have made up that emerge in the first book, and I plug my people alongside real people and real events. And that's how I do it.
I think of it as history with sugar. And fiction like, you know, most people encounter history in the movies, historical fiction, because real history, narrative history, doesn't have the drama of the opening act one, two, act three, the crescendo, all the kinds of things, and many people find history, understandably, as we are lovers of stories, when it's worked into that more familiar format.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, and personally I love these kinds of big sweeping narratives that follow individuals and families over time, and what happens to people as they relate to larger issues, but also smaller issues in their families.
Steven Leibo: When you're dealing with something like, let's say the Gilded Age, which I'm very familiar with because it was filmed around where I worked for most of my career, or Downton Abbey, when we're talking about the late 19th, early 20th century, little bit like the world we're living in right now, we're talking about a period where practically every month brought a new technological chain.
That makes it fascinating as you're following it in my case, but it's really similar to what Julian Fellows does, is you're finding these individuals as they're aging, they're using new kinds of technology and you're just integrating this story, which makes it particularly fun because it was late 19th century, somewhat like right now, a particularly fluid period.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, I was reading somewhere, I think on your website, that you incorporate Mark Twain and General Grant in your story. I'm currently reading this new biography of Mark Twain and how he was caught up in all these new inventions and all these failed investments in them.
Steven Leibo: Yeah, the man was terrible. I've read the book, and I don't live that far from the Mark Twain house. I basically tell people, yeah, I've got a doctorate and all these different degrees, but basically everything I know comes either from Mark Twain or Star Trek.
So, I go to the house, {inaudible} and attended writing workshops and stuff.
I include a great many people that are well known. One of the great delights of my work was not well known, except in certain communities, but there's a particularly well-known Chinese American who was very involved in trying to integrate China with American technology in the 19th century. He died about 1912.
He's a character that I have fictionalized, as I had done with a great many other people, but I got recently a letter from his niece saying how much she had enjoyed reading the fictionalized version of her uncle. I had to look her up: she was over a hundred years old.
Howard Lovy: Wow. Amazing. Was it a fan letter?
Steven Leibo: I can literally tell you: “I just read your book that was gifted to me by my grandson, who's about my {inaudible}, blah, blah, blah. Her name is Jane Kellogg, and this guy, his name is William J. Kellogg. They were married in Hartford, Connecticut. They were buddies of Mark Twain.
Mark Twain wrote a lot about the Chinese American situation in his career and knew the Chinese community of Hartford quite well. It had been brought over from China, introduced into different schools in America to take a body, quite a few dozen, young Chinese in the late 19th century to introduce them to western languages, western technology, things of that sort, and Twain knew the community quite well.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, he was ahead of his time in terms of that community and how they were treated.
Steven Leibo: One of my characters builds a whole writing career as somewhat parallel to The Innocents Abroad.
Howard Lovy: Before we go more into your writing, let's backtrack a little bit and go into your varied career because there's a lot to it.
Climate Change Advocacy
Howard Lovy: You wrote about Asia and the West, and you've also written about climate change, and you were involved with Al Gore's project a number of years ago.
Steven Leibo: After Gore did the Inconvenient Truth, he created an organization that eventually became known as the Climate Reality Project, and he invited, originally to Nashville, it was summer 2006, early 2007, a number of people, maybe 50 initially, about a hundred, 150 early on. And he would train them to go out into their own local communities and give lectures, basically doing the Inconvenient Truth, and doing something the movie couldn't do, which was answer questions.
I was one of the original people that was trained, in my case January 2007, and then began probably over a thousand public talks, mostly in the United States, mostly in upstate New York, on climate change and answering questions.
Gore created an organization, still very active and now global, where people are constantly supplied with new information as climate change goes from something that was likely to happen to something that is regularly happening.
For quite a number of years, I lectured, taught classes on it, formal classes at the colleges I worked at, and just as a public speaker, and spent a great deal of time in different contexts, radio and television, because I was a public radio commentator, talking and answering questions about climate change.
Howard Lovy: How do you feel about, and the last thing I want to do is get political on this show, but how do you feel about current denialism?
Steven Leibo: You know, that's always going to be an issue.
I think, yes, we are in a situation where we are in some particular context, particularly the United States, going backwards. The one advantage that this has happened now, rather than 10 years ago, is that so much technological advance has been made that increasingly, it's not a question of we're going to use fewer the fossil fuels and use more green energy because it's a good idea in the long term, but because the technology has made green energy very competitive and often more competitive in terms of financial decisions than fossil fuels.
But all of the politics that are going on right now, we could talk about that for hours. The bottom line is the financial decisions, which usually direct this kind of decision, are moving toward green energy regardless of what anybody would like.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, that's an excellent point.
Steven Leibo: That's the only saving grace is that we're further down, there's been so much innovation in recent years that now it's increasingly the smart decision to make.
That gets beyond politics or whether people can understand what a greenhouse gas is.
Howard Lovy: And the markets decide that. Exactly, yeah.
Focusing on Cross-Cultural Relationships
Okay. Let's get back into your books before we get all political on this show and I get into big trouble.
So, your series follows the son of an American missionary and his Chinese wife. What drew you to focus on this cross-cultural relationship as the center of the story?
Steven Leibo: Frankly, the bottle line is that I lived it because it's part of my family background, and I simply needed a gimmick to get the story going, which was a young man whose father was a missionary in Hong Kong, but this young man had grown up in Hong Kong, and our story begins, I don't want to ruin it, but it's like the first page of the first novel, Tienkuo: The Heavenly Kingdom.
His father wants to send him back to some place called Ohio that the kid has never heard of. The kid grew up in Hong Kong, and he runs away from home, because the second opium war is beginning and he's a kid and he wants to see what's going on, and I built that story.
Now, over time, we meet other characters. In the first book, a failed Confucian scholar, a married woman whose marriage has been a failure because she hadn't been able to produce a child, obviously in the Chinese context, a male child. And over time, from the first book, Tienkuo: The Heavenly Kingdom, Beyond the Heavenly Kingdom, this community of really initially three friends, grows over time and more characters are added quite literally as they grow them in a family context.
I'm currently writing the fourth book, and this teenager of the first book is in his fifties, in the fourth book right now.
The Shift to Indie Publishing
Howard Lovy: Now, you've published across both traditional and indie channels. After decades of experience with traditional publishers, what motivated you to embrace indie publishing and what has it allowed?
Steven Leibo: If you publish as many books as I have, traditional publishers from Berkeley and Hawaii and Prager and I don't even remember, there's so many of them, you're not nearly as impressed with what they can do, and you have no power.
And if you find a typo, and I'm an author, Murphy's Law for writers is proofreading is always more effective after publication.
You can go back in and fix it, and people talk about the much stronger editing support. That was true 40 years ago when I published my first book, but the publishing companies are cutting back and cutting back.
I regularly see typos in traditional publications all the time because they don't have the same support. People say, oh they'll market your book. Yeah, for about an hour until they get onto their next book. Whether it's traditional, or indie, you still have to do the marketing yourself. There's so many specific things.
You do a marketing effort with a traditional publisher, and you don't know if it worked because they're going to give you a report every six months or a year about how many books you sold. If you do it yourself, you can put an ad on, something, one of the promotional companies and you can check the next day if it resulted with any sales. So, you have so much more power.
But I think that, again, I'm a professor of modern world history, the evolution of technology, and in the world where everyone's got a monetized Substack and their own YouTube channel, I don't even know what people are still wondering about people who do books this way.
I did a documentary film on the Vietnam War once, and no one ever asked me if it was indie or produced by MGM. There's still this kind of funny place for where indie publishing is.
Marketing Strategies and Audience
Howard Lovy: Let me ask you the marketing question, and I ask this about all indie authors because it's the most difficult part of being an author. How do you market your books and what is your audience?
Steven Leibo: The way I market them, because I'm lazy and I write my books because I like to write my books. My currency for me is readers who like the books. That's really the only thing I care about.
The easiest thing to do, and I think everyone knows this, and if you write a series of books and those books are in e-versions, you just give the first one away once in a while
I'm in a pattern now. I give the first one away about once a month, and that creates a really mindless way, assuming the first one is any good, of selling books.
I do other things, but I'm not one of those people who's particularly concerned about making money from my books. I personally have had a zillion jobs in my life, and I cannot think of a dumber way to try and make money as writing a book.
It's 2 cents an hour, even if you pull it off, and it's only for a short while, while people are buying that book because you made the publicity for it.
So, for me it's the mindless way, and as I said, I'm not interested in money, I’m interested in interested readers, enough interested readers to tell me that I'm not, as was the case in a different generation, going to take this stack of papers and shove it in a drawer.
Current and Future Projects
Howard Lovy: So, you're still actively writing and you're working on your next book in the series.
Steven Leibo: Right now, the third book in the Sino-American Tales will be out in about three weeks, and I am, I would say, 25% into the fourth book, still following the same family through time, and outlining the fifth book.
As I said, even as I've been writing literally since I was 12, I think, this is how I want to spend my retirement. It allows you an alternative universe. I often think of it as like a Star Trek alternative world where I can live in my world, but I'm always living in those other people's world as well.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, that's fascinating. I find there's the world of your book, this alternate universe you created, it's just a little bit different from the real world. I'm finding that in the fiction that I wrote and in the sequels that I'm working on; an alternate universe is a good way of thinking of it.
Steven Leibo: And sometimes they are irritatingly linked.
For example, in the book I'm working on right now, one of the characters, a lawyer in San Francisco in the 1890s is working on the case of Wong Kim Ark. Wong Kim Ark is not particularly well known and is about to be very famous because in 1898 at the Supreme Court, he won the case that having been born in San Francisco, he was automatically an American citizen, despite all the prejudice against the Chinese in America.
And what did Donald Trump just do the other day to say, did he have the power to undo birthright citizenship?
Howard Lovy: Yeah.
Steven Leibo: We're going right back to Wong Kim Ark.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, we're going back the 19th century, isn't it?
Steven Leibo: There was a lot of ambiguity about what made you an American citizen until that case, and there's a whole history behind it, which I'm writing about in the fourth novel.
But now you're about to hear a lot more, Wong Kim Ark is going to be a lot more famous next week than he was last week.
Howard Lovy: Yeah, interesting. I think this is vital, this is important. People think that history began whenever they began to pay attention.
Howard Lovy: This has been fascinating, Steven. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Steven Leibo: I enjoyed talking about these things; they are very vital to me.
Howard Lovy: Best of luck with your retirement, even though you seem very busy. Thank you for appearing on the show.
Steven Leibo: It was an honor to be asked. Thank you. Bye.
