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Originally Posted by Stormchild
If I might ask, how do you find these? I have tried all types of search criteria with no success at all. If you would rather keep it secret I fully understand.
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There is no secret. The slushpile trawl really is exactly that.
For official publisher promo free e-books, many but not all of them will show up on the official Amazon Time-Limited Promotional Offers auto-listing, which is apparently available in different forms at least the US and UK stores. I'd link it but the bookmarks are at home on the Mac.
And Amazon has been kind of sloppy about keeping it updated in recent weeks. Sometimes the books show up late, sometimes they don't seem to show up at all (or are very deeply buried on the "wrong" page when sorting by Popularity which generally gives you the latest ones on the last few pages).
Another formerly-useful tool that Amazon broke was the ability to search things by price and format, while excluding the public domain e-books. You can still do that by either inputting the fields via the advanced search option from their paper book store, or via one of the handy Amazon search-enabling engines such as eReaderIQ's (which adds an affiliate link to your results), or learn how to tweak the search string manually. It was a great way to find glitch freebies and unusual price-matched stuff that failed to show up on the official listings.
But as I said, they broke it last year by flooding in several thousand new public domain books which they refused to allow to filter out, and while one could work around that by only selecting books published before or after but not during March 2011, with all the KDP Prime-lending "free" stuff now renders that method doubly useless.
So, probably the best way to have a look if you're not sure exactly what you're looking for (and thus can't do a custom search on your chosen keywords/publisher with a price of $0.00) is to use one of the freebie listings auto-aggregators, such as eReaderIQ's free listings or Kinlibs, both of which likely add affiliate tags to the resulting links.
Kinlib shows the blurbs but their listings scroll weirdly in this horizontal format. eReaderIQ shows the covers and the categories (often totally misfiled, so the covers come in handy when you see some thing chewing on a skull in a "self-help" book).
For sf/fantasy/horror, the quickie way to check to see if someone's listing is even worth opening is against the Internet Science Fiction Database, which will generally tell you if someone has real published credentials (and not the imaginary ones imported from the alternate universe where they really are a best-selling award-winning author with their single CreateSpace book).
Some self-pub stuff does slip through (the ISFDB does in fact list CreateSpace as one of the possible publishers) but it's usually quite easy to spot, as the author will tend to have very few novels or stories which appeared in a very short time span in venues that seem to have only existed for a few brief years and mainly publishing just the single author or a handful of apparently very closely related ones at best. And their entries won't have a VERIFIED tag.
Romance people can check their stuff by looking at the author's Amazon Author Central page (generally available by clicking on the author name dropdown if they've filled it in) and checking to see if they have a known publisher in the paperback section or a known e-press for their Kindle books. Anyone who doesn't is probably lying about being a best-selling award-winning author of many beloved vague classics. Sometimes if they have no entries because their print books aren't hooked up to the e-editions, you can run a search on their name in the physical Books dropdown and see what turns up that way.
Mystery/thriller readers can probably do the same, but mystery/thriller writers tend to self-publish under invented press names which have only ever "printed" just their books (Books: Advanced Search: By Publisher is your friend) and lie like rugs about their credentials. But consider that getting an advance workout in sleuthing out the truth within their stories.
Hope this helps.