Free Kindle titles

I've ditched yet another book, this one City of Rogues which is part one of a trilogy, and made available for free as a Kindle download.  Indie, or even self-published, the book is part of a larger group of works by the same author, one Ty Johnston.

I have high hopes for the world of indie and self-published novels, to be honest with you.  I don't really believe in the claim anymore than editors and folks who select books for publication by publishing firms offer any kind of meaningful quality control other than the most remedial.  And the fact that they've "allowed" my favorite genres, science fiction and fantasy, to be thoroughly infected by soap-opera paranormal romance/porn in fact hints that in fact the publishing world is actively trying to keep good material from me rather than provide it to me.  I've struggled to find quality fiction in the marketplace, unless by quality you mean a very basic level of polish to the grammer.  Frankly, I'd rather read a few typos in content that excites me than flawless prose of content that doesn't.

However, there remains a serious problem with this model--it's still challenging to find what is worth reading and what isn't.  And possibly, I'm actually shooting myself in the foot, metaphorically speaking, by picking up (so far, at least) only titles that are free.  Ty Johnston's City of Rogues wasn't bad, but it just really didn't excite me much.  The plot seemed rather pedestrian, and the characters rather forgetable.  At about 39% in (have no idea what the page-count would be in a traditional book format, so that's what I've got) I decided to throw in the towel and look for something I actually want to read.  Since the only time (so far) that I've gotten excited about reading an ebook on my Kindle app was when I read the first two books of the Tarzan series (and because I watched much of the John Carter movie over the holidays with my in-laws) I'll probably actually read the first three novels of the Barsoom series, also by Edgar Rice Burroughs next.  But reading books that I already own, have already read, and already know that I like kinda defeats the purpose a little bit.  I'm not quite sure where to go with this.  I've started and abandoned permanently now three different titles on the Kindle.  While I have several more to go before I've exhausted my store of readily available free titles that are first books in a series, I have to admit that I don't necessarily expect that anything else I have will be much better.  I'll probably have to venture into the world of paid-for titles.  But I'm too risk averse to spend even a buck or two on titles that I'm iffy on.  Puts me in quite the catch-22.

So, if anyone has any recommendations for self-published or indie-published ebooks at a low price, feel free to send them my way.