How books by same author sort

I have a large hard copy personal library mostly comprised of mysteries written in series, i.e. Nevada Barr and the Anna Pigeon Series, or John Sanford's "Prey" novels. I prefer, for the most part to read all series starting with the first novel written (such as "Track of the Cat" in the Anna Pigeon Series). With some series this doesn't matter since the protagonist's "personal" life does not substantially change, such as much of those written by Agatha Christie. But for many series, it does matter. Could there be added to the program a way of allowing the books which are part of a series by the same author to be shown in the order published? I include this info in the "comments" section now, but it would be nice if this could be shown in a box by itself, using 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc., and thereby keep the books in the order published?

>1 SmithfieldJones: You can add the column "series" to your catalog, but it's not sortable. That would be nice to have.

I've seen some other people use tags to sort by series.

You can add series name and number as the first tag, and subsort by tag.

Actually, for series I like to click through to the series page. That lets me see all the books in the series whether I have entered them or not.

There are issues with some series that are 'best' read by internal chronology, and also the addition of short stories, trilogies and publishers "complete" sets mid-series which combine to make automated series numbering very hard. As above, tags are the best way to do this. You'll need to add an author tag as the first tag, then the series tag, which keeps everything neatly together.

If you use sortable special characters as the lead character of the tag (eg !) then all your author/series tags will cluster at the front or back of your tag page, allowing you to utilse the rest of the power of tagging. Feel free to look at my catalogue for examples. Correcting (or changing! get it right first time) all entered books is pain, but thereafter it's trivial to correctly add the small numbers of titles as you acquire them.

I use series name and number as the first tags for series books, allowing me to sort by series order by sorting by tag.

A couple pointers, if you do this:

The relevant tags must be first in the list of tags for a book. You can use non-alphanumeric characters if you want, as reading_fox does, to change where they appear on the overall tag page, but either way the need to be first for the book.

If you use the order "series name, series number" rather than vice versa it will enable correct sorting when you have multiple series by the same author.

The tag field sorts alphabetically. This means that, for series of 10 or more books, you will need to use "01, 02" rather than "1, 2"; otherwise you'll have books sorted as "1, 10, 11...2, 3, 4...".

Feel free to look at my catalog for examples. And shout-out to someone else preferring publication order!

You can also use the "Other call number" field to define a custom sort order.

I just asked a similar question. Seems like it is a common sort desired by people that collect lots of books.

Sort by Author, Then Series, then volume in series

I think the books go into your catalogue in the order that you enter them, so if you sort by Author that's how they'll show on the page.

I use 'other call number' which is sortable and list by author, then series and then volume number. Please note that it sorts by the first digit so if your series goes above 9, I recommend putting a 0 before the single digits (01, 02, 03 ...), otherwise you'll get 1, 10, 11, 2, 3 etc.