Interview With Author Benjamin Plumb
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’m a Harvard Business School MBA was a US Army intelligence officer in Vietnam. My obsession with my introvert “winning recipe” mistakenly led me into unfulfilling careers as an entrepreneur and executive. As soon as I backed away from the recipe and began to live openly as an introvert, I found my niche as a writer and turned my life around. I live in the Tampa Bay area with Sandy, my wife of over forty years.
I’ve written two books – The Satisfied Introvert in 2022 and 2025 editions (the latter is out October 7), and First Aid for Introverts in an Extroverted Workplace.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
The Satisfied Introvert: How I Broke Free from the False Self I Created and Started Living authentically (So Can You). After releasing the first edition three years ago I began to see that it would be helpful to be more explicit about how to detach from an introvert “winning recipe.” So I added additional self-help material: (1) A chapter dedicated to “Your Own Recipe: Its Identity, Origins, Structure and Costs;” (2) collections of takeaways, reflective questions, and practical exercises at the end of each chapter; and (3) Twelve Tools of Detachment presented throughout the book and collected in a new Appendix.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Yes. I’m in bed by 2:00pm, get up around 10:00pm, and write all night long.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Primarily Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. It convinced me for the first time in my life that as an introvert I had no “defect” to fix. It is foundational reading for any introvert who wants to start living authentically, as opposed to presenting ourselves via the persona that we all created as a child to appear more outgoing than we really were.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a prequel to The Satisfied Introvert. The working title is, “The Grounded Introvert: How I Tamed my Flight Reflex and Found a Steadier Quiet (So Can You).” It will consist of 36 short stories about my six months at Stanford in France in 1963 when I was 22. At the start of the experience I was so withdrawn that I rode most of the way from San Francisco to Paris under an airline blanket. By six months later I had learned not to flee whenever I got overwhelmed by all the extroversion around me. Doing that made it possible for me to stay long enough in experiences in love, war, and business to learn lessons from them. The main lesson: I am not only OK as an introvert, but like all quiet people I have a set of 7 naturally-occurring skills that contribute huge value to a world that has gone overboard with extroversion.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
After self-publishing my first book, which was a struggle and brought moderate results, I approached a hybrid publisher – Greenleaf Book Group – with the second edition. They saw the market potential and have been an enormous help in editing, producing, and helping to market the book. Most publishers take most of the royalties and expect the author to do almost all of the marketing. As an introvert marketing for the most part is anathema to me. But Greenleaf (specifically its River Grove imprint) accepted me for who I am and worked around my distaste for promotion. I’m doing no podcasts, no newsletters, no speaking engagements, just the back room work out of the limelight that I’m good at. Hybrid publishers are pricey, but you get to keep the lion’s share of the royalties, and maintain total editorial control over the book.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
First, if you’re young, keep a journal. For most of the 60-odd years covered in The Satisfied Introvert I kept one and found it to be invaluable in creating vivid stories from the past.
Second, use a hybrid publisher if you can afford it. Otherwise you may get sequestered into giving up your royalties to a mainline publisher while at the same time you do all the marketing work that you likely are not good at, and like me, may even dislike intensely.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
As an introvert you have no “defect” to fix. Get that at a deep level, give up the persona you likely have presented to the world since childhood, and live as a straight-up introvert every day.
What are you reading now?
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the US Book 6)
What’s next for you as a writer?
Finish The Grounded Introvert and see if I can get it published. Get my new author website finished and launched in early September 2025 (currently the site only features the first edition).
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
1. Quiet, by Susan Cain. Just to keep my head screwed on as an introvert.
2. Comparative Grammar of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French. I’d spend the time learning Italian and reviewing what I already know about the other three languages.
3. The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology, by Ray Kurzweil. Today the singularity is even nearer than when he wrote the book twenty years ago.
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