How can I add sorting fields for products in my bookstore?

[JBICBV]

I am trying to add fields to my bookstore for sorting products. I'm looking to add things like Release date, author, publisher, etc., to act just like the current product category and product type. I want to be able to sort lists by this info, just like the other fields (I don't know what to call them, category, type, vendor, etc.)

I've already tried metafields, but they seem to just basically add tags, not a fully fleshed-out field with all the functionality. I even tried new themes, fresh from shopify, to see if this functionality has been added, but my product interface looks exactly the same.

As it is now, I need to add the author in the title of the book, and the release date and other info in the book description, just to have the info available to search (same functionality as a tag), but this is not ideal because it clutters the other areas with info that really shouldn't be there, and I can't sort my product list by author to get them all in order, or sort collections by release date to organize pre-release or new-releases by the date they debut (I have found tricks people use to sort collections by the date products were added to shopify, but what if I don't add them to the site in the same order as the release date?). It seems like a pretty huge thing for many websites, I don't see how these functions wouldn't be possible.

I greatly appreciate any suggestions!

[JBICBV]

Here's an example of some of the issues in the actual pages. You can see that I need to add the author to the title, and book info in the details because there is no field to the right under "organization". It's difficult to get the info to stay in place, to start with, down in the details. The field likes to add padding or take out "space lines"(hit enter to leave a space between fields). It ends up looking weird, like there is a bunch of extra space between lines for no reason or it's impossible to leave any space at all. Sometimes I need to add a period on each line, just to make sure the line stays. Then you look at the actual product page that the customer sees, and it's all out of place. This info shouldn't even need to be shoe-horned in there, but it's the best we can do, even though it doesn't really work.