I was focusing a lot on KDP Select, and free promotions, so a lot of these links relate to that.
What Makes People Buy Self-Published Books
If you only check out one of these links, make it this one. A great study on how readers find self-published novels, and what pushes them towards a final buying decision.
A success story of using the Kindle free promotion. Granted, this was written almost two years ago, but it provides an interesting perspective and loads of charts (I’m a sucker for charts). Unfortunately, Select was changed after this author experienced his success, so the effectiveness of free promotions is unlikely to approach what he experienced, but perhaps a $.99 promotion could.
Don’t Panic: KDP Select Still Works
Another Select success story, but one that occurred after the shift in Amazon policy.
Categories, Key Words, and Tags, Oh My
By the same author as the prior article, this is a discussion on the idea of tagging and utilizing key words and categories to make your novel as visible as possible. What it boils down to is, if you’re just now making your name, you’re better off placing yourself in the smallest logical group possible. Don’t set yourself up to compete against the big names if you can help it.
One of the easiest explanations of copyright law I’ve seen. If you’re confused about what you can or cannot use as a book cover, this is the place to look.
How Ebook Buyers Discover Books
A nice pie graph, with a little more detail, about how most readers find their next novel. It really drove home for me how many different irons you should have in the fire as an author (especially since first-time authors won’t have the benefit of an 18% chunk of the audience).
Valerie Thomas, Author 
I feel like publishing on amazon gets a bad rap overall. I do wish they bundled in some sort of editing help with it but I guess that would cost them too much. Hm…
Oh, me too. That would be fantastic
I bet if they did that they’d make so much money back because of the baseline of readability for all books. I mean there would still be some bad ones but at least it would help the good but flawed ones, with basic spelling, etc 🙂
It does seem like there’s a slew of novels that would benefit from editing. I can see why Amazon doesn’t offer it, but maybe if they made a tool like Grammarly, which can catch most errors, something like a free editing program would be feasible.