[Ben Thornton]

Perhaps everyone knows this, but I discovered it by experiment, and thought someone might benefit.

If you sort Amazon's books by author, the appear in surname order, but are displayed with christian name or initials first. For example "J.R.R. Tolkien" comes after "Robert Sheckley".

However, if you side-load a book with the author set to "J.R.R. Tolkien", it sorts before "Robert Sheckley". The kindle seems to ignore the Author Sort metadata.

The solution is to set the metadata to "Tolkien, J.R.R", which the kindle then sorts into the right place, but displays as "J.R.R. Tolkien".

In short:
set your authors in Calibre to "last, first" and they will display properly.

Apologies if you all know this already.