I’m serving piping, hot tea. Want some?

When ROB SHUTER and I reconnected recently at Substack’s Bestseller party, we re-exchanged contact information. Lo and behold, I still had Rob from his PR job back in the day collecting dust in my iPhone contacts. He knew me from my PR girl days at Donna Karan.

Long before Rob became the British-American journalist, author, television personality, and gossip columnist he is today, he was a celebrity publicist representing some of the biggest names in entertainment, including Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Jon Bon Jovi.

We were operating on opposite sides of the same very complicated ecosystem: publicists trying to shape the story, journalists trying to uncover it, and everyone trading information while pretending they weren’t.

Rob eventually crossed over from managing the headlines to writing them. He became executive editor of OK! magazine, hosted Naughty But Nice with Rob, co-hosted VH1’s The Gossip Table, and now writes the Naughty But Nice Substack, where he remains the person who somehow always has the tea.

Career paths fascinate me. When you spend years behind the scenes protecting people’s secrets, how do you become the person revealing them? And when I say people, I mean people like JLO. What changes when you move from pitching the story to deciding which story gets told? And after a career built around access, relationships, discretion, and information, how do you determine what is yours to share?

These are questions I think about constantly as a former publicist and now, unexpectedly, a novelist. I’ll get to ask them all to Rob tomorrow.

Rob’s debut novel, It Started with a Whisper, is set inside the cutthroat world of celebrity gossip, where four entertainment insiders land their own morning show and quickly discover that the biggest story isn’t Hollywood. It’s them. The book is about ambition, betrayal, friendship, and the very high price of staying relevant when secrets are your currency. It is fiction, of course. Fiction based on a thousand true stories.

Sound familiar?

When I was ideating the cover of Off the Record, which I literally made myself on Canva, Rob’s book wasn’t out yet. Then I saw it. Both covers have the lips, the shushing finger, and the New York City skyline. Apparently, after enough years working in PR, we arrived at exactly the same visual conclusion. It’s perfect actually.

There is something about New York, and especially the worlds of fashion, celebrity, media, and PR, that runs on whispers. A secret is passed from a publicist to an editor, from an editor to a friend, from a friend to a columnist. Sometimes it becomes a blind item. Sometimes it becomes tomorrow’s headline. And sometimes, years later, it becomes a novel.

When I wrote Leave Your Mark, I wrote about my experience in the world of fashion PR and creating the DKNY PR Girl anonymous character all through the lens of career advice. But my job was building brand awareness through magazine editorial, feature stories, and celebrity dressing. I didn’t do gossip. Well, maybe I did place a Page Six blind item here and there, haha.

But there is another side to that world: knowing which stories not to tell. Trading information to ensure the secrets you don’t want out there are kept buried. It’s an extraordinary training ground for so many different paths. The job requires strategy, discretion, judgment, and most of all, relationships.

Rob has occupied nearly every possible seat at that table. He has represented the celebrity, managed the story, chased the scoop, delivered the gossip, and now turned the entire fabulous, treacherous world into fiction.

Tomorrow, Monday, August 3, at 12:30 p.m. ET, I’m going live with Rob on Substack to talk about his illustrious career and all the tea that came with it. We’ll get into the ins and outs of being a celebrity publicist, why he crossed over into journalism, what it’s really like to work as a gossip columnist, and how he turned a lifetime of secrets into It Started with a Whisper.

Because behind every polished public image is a story.

And before it becomes a story, it’s usually a whisper.

Hope to see you here.