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Getting attention as a new author is the tricky part, but from the consumer's perspective, it also improves their access to material. I have been selling at Amazon for about six months now, and in order to get readers I've offered two works (the first book of a trilogy and a novella) for free. Those not only drive sales of my non-free titles, but get more reviews, which in turn helps get me more interest from potential readers.
I agree that sifting through the junk is tough, but just going off of Amazon's bestselling lists of genre fiction subcategories (conveniently sorted between top paid and top free titles), I've found several new authors. The challenge is getting onto those lists. One of my free books was briefly on the bestselling list of free epic fantasy titles; it "sold" about 12,000 copies in two months. But there's a lot of churn, and now the book is back down to a few hundred downloads a month. It seems that I get about one review for every ten thousand downloads, which means that the bar is especially high for new authors.
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