Where Are The Rea-...er, Authors?

It's a common phrase heard among writers. Where are the readers? I just want to find the readers. If I could get even a fraction of those readers.... You get the drift. The readers are out there. romance readers in particular are voracious and will read multiple books a month. I'm trying to remember where I read that the average romance reader will read between 5-7 books a month. Sometimes more.
That's huge! That's every author's dream demographic.

But I'm going to toss out a different question. Where are the authors? Where is my next 'auto-buy' author hiding? It's the second part of the equation that we authors generally overlook. With the explosion of e-books and self publishing we have literally thousands of books available to us. Even our favorite authors are putting out books that have long been out of print, or were never published in the first place, so we recognize the author but not the book.

And, frankly, it can be a bit overwhelming. How can we tell if we're going to like a new author? It's more difficult to loan books to our other reader friends and make suggestions. And some readers develop a personal relationship to an author (thank you social media) so it's not always safe to assume that they aren't on one of the ever growing street-teams authors are putting together, or that the author isn't their friend and that they really just think you'll like this book. Not that any of those things are bad things. Not at all. Just another part of the ever complex equation for readers and authors to find one another.

For my part-it's been a process of gathering friends that I trust when it comes to book recs. I've joined reader blogs and found some new favorites that way, I've talked to readers to figure out what they like to see if I'll like the same things. And I've needed to decide if reviews will factor into my decision about purchasing a new-to-me author.

What's worked for you when it comes to finding new authors?