Budgeting for a convention is difficult - it requires you to know all the major costs like hotel, guests, printing and so on to enable you to set a membership rate to cover them. Of course the thing that makes or breaks the budget is the membership total. If you knew in advance exactly how many people were going to show up then budgeting would be an exact science. As it is, budgets are set, revised, re-revised and, on the day, forgotten as money is spent to cover last minute panics.

The graph which follows shows the rate at which memberships arrived for Channelcon (the '82 Eastercon), Albacon II ('83) and Yorcon III ('85). (Albacon III is omitted as it is almost identical to Albacon II except in the final days when the walk-ins pushed it up around the thousand mark). The totals given are attending members only.