JUST call her Saint Joan. Last Tuesday, Joan Collins emerged from her crusade against the Random House publishing empire in Hollywood style, victorious and unsinged.

"This has ended two years of absolute hell," she said outside the Manhattan State Supreme Courthouse, a vicious wind barely ruffling her indomitable hair. "We love you, Joan", grown men shouted as their heroine, wiping away a tear, dismissed the sordid question of money and left in her limousine to celebrate.

In what the highbrow press called "a vote for verbal quantity over literary quality" the jury ruled that Random House must pay its celebrity author a $1.2 million advance and further unspecified compensation for a manuscript that its editors declared during the trial to be incoherent and unpublishable.

As Random House prepares its appeal this week, the New York publishing world remains shaken by the decision and its implications for the celebrity novel.

"Publishers have learned a hard lesson from this case," says Maureen O'Brien, book news editor of Publishers Weekly. "It's that celebrity writers aren't necessarily worth $4-$5 million."

The reading public also learned something from its glimpse inside the commercial literary machine. "A good editor can virtually take the phone book and turn it into something reasonable," said juror Mr Seth Weine after the verdict.

The phone book, maybe: Ms Collins's prose is reportedly a tougher challenge, and Random House editor, Ms Joni Evans, took visible pleasure in describing Hell Hath No Fury as "very primitive", "jumbled and disjointed", "alarming", "dated", "dull" and "cliched".

But the editor's intellectual revenge cannot erase the fact that the celebrity novelist mutation created by major publishers has turned on its makers and won. "There was a major dash to sign up popular culture icons as alleged novelists in the late 1980s and early 1990s," says Ms O'Brien, "so this kind of clash was probably inevitable."

It was Random House's hunger for Ms Collins, a writer with "high recognition factor", that prompted them to jettison a standard protection clause in her contract which would have guaranteed the publisher recovery of its advance if the manuscript proved unpublishable.

In her testimony, Ms Evans revealed the amount of molly coddling an editor is prepared to do to salvage a manuscript. She once spent a week working with Jeffrey Archer in the Bahamas after he had gone through 16 drafts with his British editor.

Ghost writers are routinely hired to relieve struggling novelists. Gradually a picture has emerged of literary SWAT teams, being dispatched to hotel suites and tropical hideaways to resuscitate stillborn text.

"To understand why this happens, you have to realise that getting attention for a book is an impossible task," says Sherryl Connelly, book review editor of New York's Daily News.

"Talk shows are pivotal for mass sales. They don't want novelists, they want celebrities. For a publisher that's the closest thing to a sure walk to the bank".

In that rarefied world, an inability to write is not an obstacle to publication, stresses Ms Connelly whose description of celebrities as "people who don't have to be intelligent to do what they do" is based on years of interviewing Hollywood luminaries.

"They live in an unreal world where everything is supplied to them. It's not that big a step from there to sending them a writer. It's accepted that the celebrity novelist does his or her real work in front of the camera.

Whether the author is William Shatner, Martina Navratilova or Oprah Winfrey, the payback has, until Ms Collins's landmark case, justified the investment, particularly in an increasingly sluggish fiction market.

"These have been a tough couple of years," agrees Ms O'Brien of Publishers Weekly, "and the dip in the female reader market persists." As far back as 1992, the Observer was warning of "the end of hardback fiction" and publishers were throwing million dollar advances at the big name most likely to turn a big profit.

Few substantial publishers resisted the temptation. "Even though we carry the mantle of quality publishing and shy away from celebrity novels, we're in a commercial business like anyone else," says Mr Alan Andres, an editor at the prestigious Houghton Mifflin house.

He recalls that 30 years ago Farrar Straus Giroux published Sammy Davis jnr's Yes I Can, and that the major event of the 1993 American Booksellers Association's convention in Miami Beach was the lofty Knopf company's extravagant party for one of its prized authors, Oprah Winfrey.

"Very few publishers talk about the great American novel any more," Mr Andres concludes. "The Holy Grail of the business now is the great Hollywood novel waiting to be written."

Today, the book industry is more dependent than ever on its brash cousin, the movie industry. Manuscripts lacking literary merit but with a strong story line are commonly touted by agents in Hollywood.

Once a film deal is struck the manuscripts become more attractive to publishers eager for free publicity. Like Hollywood, the book business is endlessly searching for The Next Big Thing, and celebrity novelists like Joan Collins were once it.

The Random House/Collins case may, however, have signalled the end of that trend. "It may indeed have peaked in the late 1980s," says Ms O'Brien. "Now the big advances are going to news related celebrities like Colin Powell, the Pope, Marcia Clark."

A general, a cleric and a female lawyer. Now those are characters that Joan Collins could really work into a bestseller.