As a kindle user what I look for in unknown authors? First and foremost the story has to be good, internally logical, internally realistic and well edited. I can accept that spelling is not always 100% (you see that in dead tree format from established authors) I can even accept grammar inconsistencies. But everything else should be spot on.

To select a new author over a known author in order: Synopsis > Price > Reviews. That all said I do ‘buy’ a large selection of the free kindle books on a regular basis and sometimes buy authors I have found through that.

You should also look at getting Calibre and perhaps adding e-com to your site and just selling books/stories that way. Lulu will do dead tree format publishing if you want to sell in that format too.

LN

Reviews are EVERYTHING, place a short paragraph at the end thanking and asking for reviews. Then, make sure your book has been proofread and previewed on a kindle, the converter can do some funky things with fonts and spacing sometimes and I’ve read a number of books with these errors that I couldn’t give 5 stars because of it.

Also, provide information about future books at the end so that readers have a reference if they like your work.

What decides if I’ll keep buying books by that author after the initial read is if the book is:
1. Well formatted. I will not try tell you how annoying I find it to try to read something which is poorly formatted for Kindle. This means indicating the start of chapters so I can skip to them,and a Table of Contents that allows me to jump between chapters. Basically, make it easy to jump around the book.

2. Spelling and grammar. When I look at a book, and there’s a spelling problem, I immediately think “Never buying stuff from this guy again”. I’m referring to spelling problems that disrupt the flow of reading, here. Same deal for major grammatical errors. These two things will cause me to dismiss the author out of hand, even if the plot and characters are well-constructed. Major spelling and grammar errors just get in the way of me enjoying the book.

Note that both spelling and grammar errors are excusable in conversation between characters, just not in the rest of the text. (I.E. A character from the Deep South having that drawl added in over the text, with things such as “y’all”, and similar regionalisms.