Looking for some guidance with literary Google products? At a Social Media Week event in Los Angeles, Google’s Melissa Daniels and Jacky Hayward outlined how the tech giant reaches out to users in online forums.

We explored these forums, finding the most useful communities for writers and publishing professionals to explore. Follow the links below to visit:

1. Google docs forum about the online writing tool

2. Google Books API forum about the book search tool

3. Books on Google Play support page for digital book readers

4. Blogger forum for troubleshooting problems on your blog

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Poet Gary Snyder has won $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award from The Academy of American Poets. Snyder was picked by the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors.

“Gary Snyder has brought to American poetry a lyric poem whose subjects and views are objectively epic,” explained Jane Hirshfield, chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, in a statement. “His words look into the world and our human lives with acuity, affection, and the ethics of a ten-thousand-year perception. They have altered and marked both how we know and how we say.”

Brenda Hillman won the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which includes a $25,000 award. David Wojahn won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his work World Tree, which also includes a $25,000 award. Catherine Barnett won the James Laughlin Award for her work The Game of Boxes which fetched her $5,000 in prize money.

PEN president Peter Godwin and World Voices chair Salman Rushdie have written a letter to the Chinese government, protesting its recent travel restrictions for artist Ai Weiwei.

This confinement means that Weiwei will most likely be unable to attend a PEN American Center event scheduled for October 11th in New York City. Here’s an excerpt from Godwin and Rushdie’s letter:

Like our colleagues throughout the world’s art and literary communities, we were shocked when Ai Weiwei was detained in 2011, and we are deeply disappointed to learn that he remains unable to travel freely and participate in international fora and conversations in which he has so clearly earned a place. We believe restricting his right to travel abroad risks violating Chinese and international laws, and that it does little to advance the goals and aspirations of the Chinese government and its people. We therefore entreat you to return Ai Weiwei’s passport immediately and lift all restrictions against him, allowing him to travel to represent his own work and his ideas.

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While promoting A Causal Vacancy, J.K. Rowling revealed a few juicy Harry Potter tidbits.

Deadline reported that Rowling may write another story set in the Harry Potter wizarding world that does not star The Boy Who Lived. She is also pondering a “director’s cut” version of two installments from the Harry Potter series, writing them them with more “finesse.”

Would you read the director’s cut of Harry Potter?

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Do you agree with the way director Marc Webb and his screenwriting team ended The Amazing Spider-Man? For those who feel dissatisfied, the “How It Should Have Ended” (HISHE) YouTube web series has just released its latest animated spoof, How the Amazing Spider-Man Should’ve Ended.

We’ve embedded the entire spoof video above–what do you think? HISHE co-creators Daniel Baxter and Tina Alexander drew ideas from the 16,000 fan comments they received concerning this project. Perhaps the filmmakers behind The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will consult this video for the sequel.

Here’s more from the release: “The video features a special guest appearance by Stan Lee, the former publisher of Marvel Comics and co-creator of Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Iron Man and most recently the star of his very own YouTube channel, Stan Lee’s World of Heroes…’How The Amazing Spider-Man Should Have Ended’ launches at a time of accelerating growth for the HISHE franchise. The HISHE YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/HISHEdotcom, recently surpassed one million subscribers, putting them in the prestigious ‘Top 100 Most Subscribed’ of YouTube’s millions of channels.”

These days we’ve heard a lot about sock puppets, authors who write reviews of their own works or dismissive reviews of competing books, but we haven’t seen Amazon reviews being used for a social cause. Until now.

Anti-circumcision advocates have posted a number of one-star reviews about the book Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin, triggered by a section in the book about the importance of male circumcision in preventing HIV in males.

“What a horrible, biased book! Sure, the little history on AIDS is interesting, but what total baloney to advocate circumcising African men to stem the HIV/ AIDS epidemic,” writes a reviewer. “If anything, circumcised men may be more likely to engage in risky behaviours.” Read more

Here are some handpicked titles from our New Books section. Want to include your book? Just read our Facebook Your New or Upcoming Book post. Don’t forget to include your title’s exact release date and a link.

Is Your Marriage on the Verge of Collapsing? by Waddy Bond: “In recent years, more than one million marriages were terminated. That’s an average of two every five minutes …The book is a beautiful and fragrant piece that can help married couples to enjoy a successful marriage.” (July 2012)

Toxic Relationship by Richard Hacker: “When the felon who killed his partner in Houston joins forces with Barry, Nick must not only stop the toxic waste dumping while finding his client’s missing daughter, but keep from being killed in the process. In the end, MaryLou’s dark secret will either help him or kill him—whichever comes first.” (August 2012)

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Web savvy authors have found new readers with book trailers. But what happens when your book gets translated and you want readers in France, Japan and Germany to pick up your foreign editions?

Now, thanks to a YouTube update, you can easily add translations to your book trailer that is already on YouTube. It’s a fairly straightforward process and doesn’t require video formatting or tech know how. If you can use YouTube, you can do this–start by making a caption track for your video. YouTube explains the next steps in this blog post:

Select “Request translation” in the YouTube Video Manager, choose the languages you’d like to translate into, and click “Next.” We’ll create caption translation documents that you can now invite anyone to help translate, or you can translate yourself. To translate the captions yourself, select the language, and it’ll open up the caption translation document in the Google Translator Toolkit editor to help your translate faster … To give you context on the captions, we’ve also embedded the YouTube video in the editor so you can watch as you translate. For several languages we’ll provide first draft of the translation using Google’s machine translation technology. We’ll also provide preview of what the translated caption looks like on the video so you can make sure the translated captions fit.

(Via AppNewser).

The Harry Ransom Center announced that literary scholars can now examine a trove of drafts and materials from David Foster Wallace‘s unfinished and final novel, The Pale King.

Follow this link to view digital copies of six drafts of one section from this new collection (image embedded above). The Center acquired the six boxes of materials, but Little, Brown and Co. kept the papers until after the paperback edition was published. Check it out:

The Pale King materials fill six boxes and  include handwritten and typescript drafts, outlines, characters lists, research materials and a set of notebooks containing reading notes, names, snippets of dialog, definitions, quotations and clippings. The materials have been organized according to a spreadsheet developed by Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch. Pietsch, then-executive vice president and publisher of Little, Brown and Co., spent months reading through and organizing the material and found what he called “an astonishingly full novel, created with the superabundant originality and humor that were uniquely David’s.” (Image via David Foster Wallace Literary Trust)

I am delighted that my new novel for adults is published today.

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) September 27, 2012

Did you buy a $17.99 eBook copy of J.K. Rowling‘s A Casual Vacancy before 3 p.m. ET on September 27? You are entitled to a new digital copy of the book. Hachette has published an official statement about the formatting problems with the eBook edition:

Yesterday the eBook file for The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling was released to all U.S. eBook retailers. There were issues with that file, including the adjustability of font color and size and adjustability of margins. As soon as Hachette was made aware of these issues, a replacement file was uploaded to all eBook retailers. Hachette has requested that each retailer contact their customers directly about reloading their eBook. Any consumer who purchased the eBook on Thursday, September 27, before approximately 3:00pm ET, who has not heard from their retailer, should contact them and request that their eBook be reloaded. No consumer should have to repurchase the eBook.

The novel for adults has earned some divided early reviews on Amazon For A Casual Vacancy. As of this 5:30 p.m. ET writing, the book had 19 five-star reviews and 15 one-star reviews. The majority of these early reviewers have not read the book.
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