PREACH IT! How much would you pay to read about LeAnn Rimes’ engagement?

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When stars ask us to respect their privacy, they’re often really asking us to respect their bank accounts. In Hollywood, a celebrity’s most tear-jerking moments -- a wedding, a first portrait with a new baby -- often are guarded to preserve not intimacy, but rather exclusivity, so that those private moments can be packaged and sold to a tabloid for the highest amount possible.

Take, for example, chronic oversharers LeAnn Rimes and Eddie Cibrian: According to a new E! Online report, they were hoping to sell their engagement story to a tabloid -- until that uppity media disobeyed.

Per E! Online:

(For the record, Rimes has denied all engagement-related activity, in a very long, very angry tweet.)

Rimes and Cibrian may be even angrier when they hear this: Tabloids probably didn’t want their engagement story anyway.

From my perspective, this certainly wouldn’t be a main cover story,’ says Mark Pasetsky, former editor of OK! magazine. “The photos that sell the most are the actual weddings, the baby photos. The engagement itself is not going to be a win for them. It would fetch $10,000 to $20,000 at best.”

And no, that’s not a lot of cash.

‘Real money?’ says Pasetsky, who also founded the website Cover Awards, ‘That would be like 100,000 or something. For a star like, say, Carrie Underwood.’

Ouch.

But lest we dismiss all celebrities as sellouts, here’s another bit of data: Not all celebrities care about money. Orlando Bloom wedded supermodel Miranda Kerr in secrecy, for example, and Katherine Heigl gave away a single wedding photo to all news outlets, for free, at the same time.

-- Leslie Gornstein

Related dispatch from the Ministry of Gossip:

LeAnn Rimes, Eddie Cibrian will be shacking up