Best practices for book output?

[Christopher Meredith]

I may be in over my head. What I am trying to do is produce a hymnal.
After much experimentation, I have settled upon a layout I like that I
am using on a per-hymn basis. I have abstracted these portions of my
input files and created header.ly and footer.ly. For each individual
hymn, I then use \include to incorporate the header and footer so I
have a consistent layout which can be globally updated as needed.

Eventually, I want to compile these into a book. I have experimented
with lilypond-book but so far am completely lost. On a whim I tried
making a book.ly and simply using \include to reference all my hymns.
The output was pretty close to what I would like, except I think I
would need to figure out how to fix the distances between certain
elements because the auto placement often settles on undesirable
results.

My first question, therefore, is how I should approach this situation;
creating independent files (with titles and footers) for eventual
assembly into a book. I can share samples of my input files if it will
help.

My next question is whether there is any way that I can assemble
something of an index. For each hymn I have a variable definition
section at the top that looks like this:

Title = "I Will Sing My Maker's Praises"
Writer = "Paul Gerhardt, 1659"
Translator = ""
Composer = "Johann Schop, 1641"
Arranger = ""
Tune = "SOLLT' ICH MEINEM GOTT"
Meter = "8 7.8 7.8 7.7 8.7 7"

I would really like to be able to create an index such as that found
in most hymnals to look up selections by any of the criteria listed
above. Can this be done?

Thanks all in advance for your help. I'm loving lilypond. I've learned
so much and still haven't scratched the surface!