Confusion re order displayed on series page

I'm a tad bamboozled by the order in which a series which I'm playing with is displayed. It's Tales of the Beanworld.

The series consists of the issues of the comic and 2 sets of collections. As is hopefully clear, the collections don't match, i.e. book 1 of one set is issues 1-4, book 1 of the other is issues 1-9. I've indicated this by labeling one set with the publisher - Dark Horse.

Trouble is, at the moment they are displaying in this order:
Book 1: 1-4 collected
Book 1: 1-9 collected - Dark Horse
Book 3 - Dark Horse
Book 2: 10-21 collected - Dark Horse
Book 3.5 - Dark Horse
Book 4: 12-16 collected
Book 3: 8-11 collected
Book 2: 5-7 collected
and then the individual issues

What I'd like is (though I'm not fussed about the order of the 3 categories)
{Dark Horse books}
{Other books}
{Individual issues}
Appropriately ordered within the categories, obviously.

So... what on earth leads them to be ordered as they are at the mo? And how can it be fixed? I experimented with changing e.g. "Book 3.5 - Dark Horse" to "Dark Horse Book 3.5" but that just stuck it between issues 3 and 4 of the comic, which really doesn't help. Not really fussed about exactly how they are described, as long as the present information is retained.

Thanks for any help here!

With multiple possible groupings, you should use the pipe sorter - |

Generally, you can use the decimal for subsorting, but I always found it frustrating to fit in other items, so for the really huge ones I go out to the hundreds or thousands. 1001 for the first book of the first group, 2001 for the first book of the second group, and so on.

So with this scheme you'd number the first grouping (10## | Dark Horse: #), and then following groupings (20## | Collected Issues #-#) and (30## | Issue #). Of course, switch the # to the appropriate digits!

Note the second example below the CK series entry box, "The Chronicles of Prydain (0|prequel)."

The number placed before the pipe (|) character sets the order but is not displayed. This is useful for series with a complex order. So if there are several subsets of works in the series you could order them 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. with those numbers placed before the pipe and whatever descriptor is appropriate after the pipe.

Ah, that would be the ticket, thanks!

And when the numbers before the | are equal, the sorting order is by title of the work.