When sorting by author, this is what I mean:
That's with the "author sort" field manually tweaked to contain "Laumer, Keith" as the first entry. I suppose I could delete all the other authors from that field to get the sort correct, but it's just a minor inconvenience at this point solved by sorting by series!
For "spin off" or multiple series I added a custom SubSeries column. Series is then the "main" series column and SubSeries gets additional info- for example for Ringworld books, "Known Space" is the Series and numbered according to a suggested reading order, while Ringworld will be the SubSeries numbered according to it's series number.
I also created a seperate "Meta" yes/no column so I can check off the books I've verified the metadata for- I could have avoided that by updating metadata as I added books but I added a lot of books all at once and am in the process of cleaning them up (about 10-15 books a day). I'll probably delete that field once I get caught up! I do download meta info for books that need it, but even then have to clean it up manually after. I'm to the point now where the only fields I really care about are Author, Title, Series/SubSeries, Comments and a good quality cover image.