You know, I'd be pretty torn on this too. I write fiction books IRL, and it's a lot of the same sort of thing you see on the e-book market places.

There is simply such a massive flood of people who are all trying to do the same thing that it's very easy to get lost in the noise. It's almost impossible to stand out by virtue of talent alone. The varying quality level of those e-books is very dramatic, and yet even the ones that are legitimately brilliant, can just fad away in the noise.

My own experience is that you do have to take some kind of promotional stance to stand out and get your voice heard, but one of the keys is to remember that you can't reach everyone, so just try to reach your tribe, so to speak.

Even in those promotion's though, there's so many shady options. Like you can buy positive Amazon reviews, and that just feels nasty to me. I did that once and felt so bad about it, I scrapped the book and re-released it just so I could shove those reviews away.

You should be able to rise on your own merits, but that's not going to happen if no one hears what you are saying.