More on Reader Reviews and the Kindle Top 100

So this weekend I was busy doing "research" on my new Kindle, still trying to crack that code on big ebook sales.

There's a lot of well-known books and authors on the Top 100 (James Patterson, Tom Clancy, Water for Elephants, The Book Thief) selling for what I think is too much for an ebook. Why am I going to pay $14.99 and not even get a "real book"? But then I'm still kind of old-fashioned that way. And frugal. After paying so much for an e-reader, I don't want to pay $10 for each book I download.

So this led me to the Top 100 that are $.99. Checking summaries and reviews, many of these looked like they might be good reads, at least some value for the money. And there's self-published author Amanda Hocking, with at least 6 titles on the Top 100. That means she's good, right?

So I downloaded a few of these titles and started reading. I did enjoy Hocking's Blood Flavor-- the first one was .99 and I liked it. I liked her voice, her style of writing and didn't find too many editing errors. Overall, a pretty fun read, so I downloaded the first one in her next series (also $.99) about the trolls.

Then I read the reviews and had to laugh. They were either 5 star "I LOVED this book!" or 1 and 2 star "What are you people thinking???!! This book is CRAP." I'll still read it, but I won't order any of the others in either series because I didn't like it that much, and the rest are $2 and $3.

I'm still downloading a few .99 authors who seem popular but I'm finding that reading these books is like reading a manuscript that needs editing. There's potential, but definitely in need of an editor's touch.

So what have the rest of you found as you've been searching the Top 100 on your e-readers? Any great $.99 values? Or have you found a lot of rough stuff that somehow (not sure quite how) found an audience?