Loooooooooons!

I have something appalling to share, but a little background information is required first.

Embarrassingly enough, back in the spring of 2003 during American Idol 2, I found myself among a group of Clay Aiken fans posting on the excellent Television Without Pity forums. (Shut up, he has a beautiful voice.) Anyway, after the show ended, there was a little skirmish in the fandom, and it splintered into the crazily intense fans, and the unintense fans who refused to venerate him. The unintense group basically continued to chat with each other, casually follow Clay's career if time permitted, and there was also a chicken involved. Ahem. But watching the crazy group has been an interesting study in psychology and how a "group mentality" can really encourage more and more crazy behavior. I remember last year around Thanksgiving and Christmas, people were posting about how their families were planning intervention-like things to address their obsessive fandom, and everyone else would tell them that their family just didn't understand Clay Aiken and his "relationship" with his fans, and blah blah and blah.

The thing is, a lot of them seem to be quite intelligent, but it's just so misguided. For example, Clay Aiken has written a book. A memoir, nonetheless, which I think is hilarious because he's only 25, about a month older than I am, and I only have an "m" towards having a "memoir". At most, an "m" and half of an "e". At the moment, their project is calculating sales figures, because they worry about poor Clay Aiken. Will he sell enough CDs/books/concert tickets? Are he and his dog going to sit in his mansion and starve to death? To quell their anxiety, they like to speculate. Today, someone sent me this insanely detailed post:

Assuming a print run of 230k copies:

Per unit cost: $690,000 (230k x $3.10)
Fixed costs: $12,000
Advance: $1,000,000
Total Out-of-pocket costs (including advance): $1,702,000 [no ... I haven’t forgotten overhead ... I’ll factor it in later]

Income:

I found an article from 1998 which claimed that the average trade discount was between 47% and 48%. I’m inclined to think the 48% margin is a fair figure to use since I also found a 2003 interview with an independent bookseller that claimed the standard margin is 40%. The big chains get a bigger discount, as do distributors, and I expect they account for the biggest segment of the market. What the 48% figure means is that the publisher would sell the books at an average discount of 48%, and would therefore receive 52% of the list price for every copy sold. LTS has a list price of $21.95, so the publisher would collect $11.41 per copy. At that rate, LTS would have to sell 149,168 copies to break even on out-of-pocket costs of $1,702,000. [149,168 x $11.41 = $1,702,006.88]

Remember the 33% (*shudder*) overhead? We’ll factor it in now, since it’s calculated on sales rather than costs. LTS would have to sell 222,638 copies to break even on out-of-pocket costs plus 33% overhead:

Gross income: $2,540,299.58 (222,638 x $11.41)
Overhead (33% of gross income): $838,298.86
Out of pocket costs: $1,702,000
Total Costs: $2,540,298.86

See, I think these people could have done lots of volunteer work, or at least something productive, and really given back to society. Maybe even cured a disease or two. I probably could have finished my thesis in the amount of time they spent researching all of that loony math. Instead, their kids are eating lint and their husbands have thrown in the towel after 18 months of having one-sided conversations with the lump in front of the computer chair who is clad in head-to-toe Clay Aiken garb and surrounded by empty Cheetos bags and beef stick wrappers. And a calculator. And Clay Aiken CDs, of course! If you don't have 15 copies on your person at all times, to hand out unsolicited to random people, then you are a terrible fan.

Ack. I REALLY tend to ramble when I get on the topic of loony Clay Aiken fans. I wonder if it's just his fandom or fandoms in general that are so crazy? I've never been in the midst of another fandom, so I don't know. But I can't imagine a group that would top these people.

Disclaimer: There are people on that board that are sane. But they're few and far between, and they tend to get lost among the crazy.