Still a Newbie after all these years: Opinions on Kindle?

Feel free to move this thread. I'm sorry if it's in the wrong place.

I am seeking opinions regarding Kindle publishing. Does anyone have experience with this? I did go to the Amazon Website and downloaded what I could about Kindle, and even received some feedback from one of their reps via my email questions.

They do not have telephone support yet, so I'm grateful that they are patient with me.
Basic questions I have for my writing friends are:
When is it a good idea (or is it a good idea) for an unknown author to sign their agreement? (It's not exactly a contract, but a user agreement, I think)

They say the authors are free to go with a "regular" publisher later. Do you all have any opinions on this? I've heard there are some authors who have done very well going with ebooks first. It's still basically POD though, but looks like Amazon can at least get the book up on their pages. I guess it is up to the author to do the marketing....

My main problem would be formatting. I don't think they offer tech support and I have no idea how this works...and then there's the book cover too!

Any advice greatly appreciated.
Writer Friend

Thank you

jvc said:

I'm going to port this over to the E-Publishing forum, you may get more responses there.

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Thank you, I'll check that out.
Writer Friend

zpeteman said:

The user agreement is nothing to worry about, it doesn't have anything to do with the rights to your work. Basically it just says that if your Kindle book is $5, then your Barnes and Noble ebook can't be significantly cheaper. It also says that Amazon can lower the price of your book for promotional reasons any time they want. This is a good thing because they pay you royalties based on the price you set, not the price they sell the book for.

You can retract your book any time you want.

Formatting is easy, just read the instructions and use the preview function on the DTP portion of Amazon's website.

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Reply from Writer friend to ZPeteman:
Thank you for your info! Much appreciated,

KMTolan said:

Not sure how true that is. While there are always exceptions, I'm sure, I would doubt there would be much incentive for a publisher to pick your work up once it's been out in the world.

Kerry

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Reply from Writer Friend:
I was a bit worried about that too. I have read some stories about authors who did the ebooks first, and were picked up by major publishers, and that may be rare. But I keep hearing how popular Kindle is, and many lit agents are now reading queries. I've had several agents tell me to send my ms over by email and that they read the submissions on Kindle. Thank you very much for your response!