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silivrensf said: I apologize in advance for any misspelled names. I tend to listen to audiobooks more than read these days so I'm mostly guessing.

I'm horrible at math and so I tend to shy away from numbers unless it's something obvious. Seeing a big string of numbers would put me off. I'm definately in favor of an INTITIAL+DATE (GFL2683 or MOD2007, CRY*, OLD*, etc.) model. You only need to add additional years (GFL2683-2684), months (GFL2683.5), or days (GFL2683.5.19) if they are significant to a specific story. Most people are capable of figuring out a yearly sequence even if you only use the main year in which the story takes place. An advantage of this is not only is the sequence shown, but if you add eras or want to separate a mini series from the main one, then you just give it a new set of initials (FRED for example or whatever seems right to you). Readers can tell from the dates that the stories overlap, but it doesn't force them to read them all if they don't want to in order to figure out the order. Any stories you give their only intitials will probably need a certain amount of explanation anyway, so it's not like the readers will be missing something if they get hooked on only a side-shoot of a larger era.

Look at the way you handled the modern era books already: readers who have read both infected and ancestor will put 2 and 2 together to get 4 that they take place roughly around the same time and have overlapping characters. You didn't need any kind of numbering or lettering system to tell them this.Don't forget to give your audience a certain amount of intelligence credit. After all, if they are into your stories, they probably appreciate the level of thought and detail that goes into them. :)

The problem, in general, is that you never tell stories the way you live life, from beginning to end, with no going back. If you write stories about the GFL, but they are side stories, then you'll probably want to keep them in GFL* anyway. Say you are telling Gredok's back story. Unless you are going to give him his own series, it'll probably be labeld something like GFL2592 (I'm throwing out a wild number here that I know will be prior to Quentin's time). That tells the readers who care that the story takes place 91 years before the events of The Rookie, but is lumped into the greater story of the GFL.

I also agree that some thought should be given for publishing some kind of timeline in the introductory pages of future books if you are going to be concerned with readers connecting the stories and think a lettering or numbering system is too complicated. Even a timeline accurate list without dates would be good enough: "In chronological order according to when they take place: Infected, Ancestor, Contagious, The Rookie, The Starter, The All-Pro". Like that. Many of the series I've read in my life (most noteably the Dragonriders of Pern) have book lists in the front that have made an effort to at least list the books, which at least tells you the order in which they were written. It helps loads when trying to figure out the author's logic. Yours would obviously be in story-chronological order, which is better, but it's better than nothing for sure.

I guess overall, I like these two suggestions best. they both have the opportunity to address your chronology problem without getting overly complicated.

On a side note, concider sometime in the long-term future publishing an "Overview of the Siglerverse" type reference book. Hardcore fans love that kind of stuff. :D I have several of those in my library for LOTR and Dragonriders of Pern. They are great to collect!