Producing a hymnal with lilypond

[Christopher Meredith]

I'll try to sum this up as succinctly as possible. I am trying to put
together a supplemental hymnal. To this point, I have been using a
hymn template I found online to make "one off" hymn sheets on normal
letter size paper. It's getting to the point where I want to put them
in book form. I have *no* experience with LaTeX so naturally I am
scared to death of lilypond-book. I'm hoping there's an easy way to
accomplish my goal:

Basically, I have a collection of individual .ly files for each hymn.
I want to assemble them in order, have consecutive page numbers at the
bottom (or top corner), but most importantly, put it together in such
a way that space is not wasted. For example, I'd like to have a short
hymn that takes up only a half page to appear right after a hymn that
takes up, say, a page and a half. I do *not* need to add additional
elements, such as text of graphics. Everything I want to print is
already included in the .ly files (except page numbers).

My hope is that I could create a very simple .lytex file and just use
a bunch of sequential "\lilypondfile" instructions. I tried it
briefly, but the alignment was off (left margin large, music ran off
the right edge).

Is there a relatively straightforward way to accomplish this, or am I
barking up the wrong tree?

Thanks all!