Writer Walter Ellis talks about a common problem of ebook sales, even if you’re had some success in the traditional market.

It was then that a cloak of invisibility descended. The only people who knew about London Eye were my immediate friends and family, my facebook friends and those whose sadness is defined by their close personal knowledge of recent uploads to the Kindle Store. A number of those I approached – one of them a distinguished publisher – didn’t know there was such an entity as the Kindle Store and were unable to find the book without the equivalent of global satellite navigation.

In the Kindle store this will only be made worse by the continuing plague of Kindle Spam (for another take on the damage, look here. So the question rises, “how do you become visible?” How do you go from the vast mass of 99 cent books, to being known for yourself? There are a few ideas, from this post, but what other approaches have people tried? What worked and what didn’t?

And of course, from Good Ereader– the rumors of the death of the Agent may be highly exaggerated.

And this may finally be the way things go– with the rise of spam and the rise of people just simply putting in books that are not ready for prime time, we may see the rise of more and more ebook only “labels” that primarily assure the reader that “Yes, this book is an original work, that isn’t a single 210 page run-on sentence.” That being said, expect that over the new few years, things will probably remain very rocky for the new ebook author trying to get published. On the other hand, remember that even so, you still have a vastly greater chance as a self published ebook author to get noticed than you do going the traditional route– count up the new authors in the B&N science fiction section (don’t count old authors with new books, or book number 431 in the “Luke Skywalker buys a sandwich” property, and you’ll see just how damnably hard it is to get into the stores.