I seem to find new authors mainly by word-of-blog these days, and occasionally by browsing bookstore shelves -- though even there I'm more likely to pick something up if I've seen it mentioned online. Online bookstore recommendations don't seem to be very useful as a rule, at least for fiction. The tor.com giveaway e-books introduced me to several new authors the year they were doing that; some of those I went on to buy in paper format, some not.