Assistance with adding series titles/number - Calibre 0.8.2/Nook Classic

[Galora]

Good Morning,

I spent hours playing with my Nook and Calibre last night and still can't figure this out. At this point I have restored all of my Calibre settings to default and hope that will make things easier to troubleshoot.

I recently purchased a new laptop and downloaded the most recent version of Calibre. Before I figured out how to transfer my library from my old computer I had re-downloaded all of my books and added them to my Calibre here on my new computer. Now for some reason I can't get the series title and series number to show up correctly when I move my books to my Nook.

Previously I used the following:

Preferences->Metadata Plugboards

Format [Any format] Device [Nook]
Source template: {series} {series_index:0>2s} {title}
Destination Field [title]

Things showed up correctly in the 0.7 version of Calibre.

In the 0.8 version this is what happens:

I try to add the following books:

Author: Erin Nicholas
Series: Bradfords
Just Right (this is book 1)
Just Like That (this is book 2)
Just My Type (this is book 3)

With everything thing set at default the output on my Nook looks like this (view set to sort by author name):

Nicholas, Erin
Just Like That: The Bradfords, Book 2 (which is fine but I don't know why the author is listed as last name first)

Erin Nicholas
Just My Type: The Bradfords, Book 3
Just Right

So - The author is displaying incorrectly on book 2.
In the meta data for that book Author is Erin Nicholas and Author Sort is Nicholas, Erin

And the first book in the series does not have the series name and number included.

I've read the User Manual on Template Language and I have to admit it got me a bit more confused.

Am I understanding correctly I should be editing under the following?
Sending books to device
Current template: {author_sort}/{title} - {authors}

According to the user manual I should use {series}{series_index:| - | - }{title} to get the output I want?

I'd like to have the following
Erin Nicholas
Just Right: The Bradfords, Book 1
Just Like That: The Bradfords, Book 2
Just My Type: The Bradfords, Book 3

I'd also like to be sure that if the books added are not part of a series they don't have a leading -

I really hope I've provided the correct information but if not, please let me know what else you need.

Thank you so much!

Galora