Peter Miller, director of publicity for Bloomsbury and Walker & Company and owner of a used bookstore in Brooklyn, served on a panel at the recent South by Southwest Interactive Festival. Though best known for its cutting edge film and music, the festival has become “an open source forum for new media, where bloggers, tech geeks, activists, designers and marketers meet to trade ideas.” writes Miller. The panel was entitled “New Think for Old Publishers” and attendees were urged to “find out what is going right and what is going wrong with publishing, assess success of recent forays into marketing digitally, and learn how books and blogs can work together.”

In what may be one of the bigger understatements in the history of the Digital Paradigm Shift, Miller reports that “somewhere during the 5–6 p.m. time slot of SXSW Day 3, we apparently went a little off message.”

In fact it was a debacle. It was the Gallipoli of all panels.

The good-natured Miller, having somehow extracted his tail from between his legs, has filed a hysterically funny account with Publishers Weekly. If you can maintain a face as stoical in the reading as Miller’s is in the telling, you have far greater control over your facial muscles than I do.

Miller follows his narrative with a list of Don’ts that all denizens of Old Publishing should memorize before taking their seats at panels attended by anyone younger than twenty.

Read Do As I Say, Not As I Do for a model of book industry graveyard humor.

RC