[Cootey]

TL;DR You can’t change this currently, I’m afraid. Apple doesn’t allow you to edit the author tags of DRM’d ebooks, and their author sorting is fairly dumb. If the publisher entered the author as “A B” instead of “B, A”, you’re out of luck.

Apple Books inconsistently allows me to edit some authors and not others. If the file is a PDF, I’m allowed to edit that field (View by list, then click once to select the book, wait a beat, then click again on the author field). Sideloaded epubs act as if I can edit them, but the edit doesn’t stick. In those cases, I remove the book, edit the meta tag data in Calibre, then reimport it. DRM’d books won’t even pretend to let you edit the author field.

However, since I can’t strip DRM from Apple Books, and Apple worries only about pleasing publishers and not readers with their occasionally updated software, I moved away from that app years ago and mostly use the Kobo and Kindle apps now. I just use Books to access my PDF collection.