Songbook
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| Synonyms: | filk book, filkbook |
| See also: | zine |
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A songbook (or song book) is a print fanwork for filks. They are less likely to be single-author collections than fanzines, although those do exist. It used to be common for filk conventions to have a con filkbook (just as some ship-based conventions sometimes had a zine of member submissions); with the advent of the internet, this practice basically died out.
Some of the most well-known filkbooks are Filthy Pierre's Microfilk, NESFA Hymnal I and II on the east coast and Westerfilk on the west, and Minus Ten and Counting, the latter being one of the few cases of a songbook matching an album release.
There were/are no sharp lines about content in filk songbooks; just as fanzines may contain fanfic, original fic, meta essays, and art of various types, filkbooks may contain parody songs, meta songs about fandom, character or shipping songs, AU ballads about a fandom, songs about Paganism, Renfaire or the SCA, or original songs about common filk topics, which include space, cats, and the filk community itself.
Types of Filkbooks
There are no official categories for types of filk songbooks; they have always been too niche for that. Often they are, like fanzines, made in a single print run and distributed until gone, so dealer's room sellers or other distributors did not have "categories" as much as "a stack of books," sometimes multiple stacks. Even the publishers rarely separated single-fandom from multi-fandom collections; they were more likely to be sorted by emotional theme: Funny books of light-hearted parodies, serious topics, angsty books, romance song collections, etc.
- Multi-genre single issue: Microfilk, NESFA Hymnals (there were two, but they were not scheduled as a series), [Horse Tamer's Daughter]
- Multi-genre periodicals: Xenofilkia, Bayfilk songbooks (annual with the convention)
- Single-fandom: The Star Trek Songbook, The Sime/Gen Songbook, Hip Deep in Heroes (A Blake's 7 songbook), The IDICon Song Book ([[[Trek TOS]] [K/S]]-focused)
- Single author: Bob Kanefsky's Songworm series, Roberta Rogow's Sing a Song of Trekkin' (also a single-fandom book), Cynthia McQuillan's Dark Moon Circle.
Publishers
Many publishers of filk only produced albums; some produced songbooks as well.