Need help setting up products

My woocommerce shop primarily sells books and I’m not sure about the best way to set it up.

Right now, each title is a variable product with variations being different editions of that title. Each edition has it’s own unique 13 digit ISBN, so I’ve been using that number as the SKU for each variation. The SKU for the parent product is an ID number that matches the ID number for that title in a separate database.

Setting it up this way lets me have all the editions for a single title on one product page. However, while the majority of information for each edition is the same (title, author, publisher, description, etc.), some information is different (publish date, page count, etc).

I used some custom coding in my functions.php file to add custom fields to my variations, but it causes problems with some of my other plugins that don’t expect variations to have custom fields that don’t match the parent product. It also makes it hard when I want to display or feature only one particular edition of a book.

Is there a better way for me to set up my products?

Thanks.