templates?
 

I've converted a few books from epub to .txt. My problem is I want them as (Author - Title), instead they always come out as (Title - Author). IE I want the format (Ben Bova - Colony) instead of (Colony - Ben Bova). I've fiddled around with the templates on save to disk, but nothing makes any difference.

You are probably looking at the way Calibre stores books internally. You can't change that. If you change the template on save to disk to what you want, then right click a book in Calibre and actually save it to disk (think "export a copy out of Calibre and give it the template name") you will see that the template allows you to save books (export them) to any folder with any name.