Member: annekaelber

You're taking on the BBY novels? You're far braver than I am!

Unfortunately, there's no one format; I admit to fudging things where I don't expect more books in the middle (Legacy of the Force), or where it just made things easier (Legacy).

For the NJO books, the numbers are XX.YZ, where XX is the year, Y is the story in that year, and Z is the book number within that story (0 if it's a standalone, 1/2/3 for the duologies/trilogies).

For the LOTF books, the decimals are simply the book number; hardly futureproof if there's any more books in 40 ABY, though!

For the Legacy comics, it gets slightly trickier because of the 1/2 issues and the trade paperbacks. For individual issues, I take the issue number and tack a 0 on the end—so #1 becomes 010, the 1/2 became 005, and #19 became 190. For a trade paperback containing issues through #7, it would be 071—the first item right after the last issue it includes.

(The key is that LT doesn't sort in true decimal order; instead, it sorts everything after the decimal point numerically, so "10.1" comes before "10.2" comes before "10.11", even though 10.1 < 10.11 < 10.2. If you make sure that you have the same number of digits all the way across, adding zeros at the end as need be, then it'll sort them as if they were numbers.)

If you were trying to come up with one universal format, the one used by the NJO books is probably the most flexible in terms of being able to insert later books as needed, or work comics in around the books.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

posted by ATimson at 11:12 pm (EST) on Aug 6, 2008