The former DKNY PR Girl and bestselling author has published 60,927 words of an incomplete fiction manuscript on the platform, with new instalments dropping every Wednesday.
Aliza Licht, personal branding expert, bestselling author and founder of Leave Your Mark, is releasing an unfinished novel on Substack before it is complete, as first reported by WWD. The book, titled Off the Record: Secrets of a 90s Fashion Insider in New York, is not a memoir but is drawn from real events and what Licht describes as what actually happened behind the scenes in the fashion industry during the late 1990s — back when access was controlled, influence was earned, and most of what mattered happened behind closed doors.
In the novel, Licht’s protagonist Jessica Altman — a successful fashion PR executive — discovers that her longtime nemesis is preparing a revisionist memoir, and launches an anonymous blog to expose the truth behind her rival’s carefully constructed public image. Licht has confirmed there is no direct Donna Karan storyline, but stated that her years in fashion magazines and PR informed the backdrop. “If Leave Your Mark was The Devil Wears Prada meets career advice, Off the Record is what happens when you finally tell the truth about that world,” she wrote. “Anyone who lived through it will recognise the tone, the dynamics, and the unspoken rules.”
Licht has structured the release as a serial, dropping new manuscript chapters every Wednesday with no editorial filter and no traditional publishing timeline. Once she reaches the end of what has been written, she intends to use reader reactions to shape what follows. The project marks a deliberate departure from the conventional publishing model — one she has followed twice before. “I didn’t want to finish this in a vacuum,” she wrote on Substack. “And I definitely didn’t want to wait two years to publish it the traditional way.”
Within a day and a half of launch, the Substack attracted 281 subscribers including 29 paid, generating approximately $1,466 in revenue, and ranked fifth on Substack’s rising list in the fashion and beauty category. Licht spent more than two decades in fashion, serving as senior vice president of global communications at Donna Karan International, where she created the anonymous social media persona DKNY PR Girl — a character that generated over 230 million media impressions upon her public reveal. Her podcast Leave Your Mark has surpassed 2 million downloads worldwide.
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