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As for the cream rising by word of mouth etc. Well yes but a) I find that there are almost as many crap book-review bloggers as crap books and
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Well sure, but it doesn't take a whole heck of a lot to track down a handful that you can trust to be consistent (consistently bad or consistently good doesn't really matter). Haven't you learned which of your friends' reading recommendations coincide with your own?
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b) the ones that do seem to generate word of mouth that reaches my ears are almost all traditionally published name authors - something to do with marketing perhaps?
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I don't know what to say. Just browsing the reading recommendation forum here has turned up quite a few independently published authors I might not have heard of otherwise.
Look, I'm not saying everybody should be reading self-published authors--heck, I read very few of them myself--I just don't think having a booming self-pub ebook industry is anything to be
afraid of. It's not going to ruin literature, it's not going to steal food from your favorite authors' tables (unless they stop writing stuff that people want to read), and it's not going to club baby-seals senseless. In fact... it doesn't really have to affect you at all. Your big-ticket favorites are still going to be there, and somebody else will always be willing to wade the slush-pile for you, and the "cream" of the indies will find their way onto mainstream's radar (at which point they might not be indie anymore). You're not going to run out of stuff that you
want to read in your lifetime.
And as far as worrying about typos, mispelling and terrible writing: samples. It shouldn't really take anyone more than a paragraph or two to determine that a writer falls waaaaay below their personal requirements for competence with regard to putting sentences together.
Read what you like. Just wait until your supply actually starts to show signs of drying up before you start complaining that rubbish indies ate your baby.