I am considering a career change and wonder if there is a call for supporting established authors - such as website maintenance, handling PR calls, PA support, answering letters from public, events etc? Does anyone have such support, or can they envisage needing that in future - if so where would you look? Does your publisher help? Mary
When I think of all the "acknowledgements" pages where research assistants are thanked for their invaluable help, I believe that your Q has been answered. It probably was more common in the past and perhaps in the other direction (aspiring writers acting as PAs, working for peanuts and job experience). (For example) in John Irving's "A Widow For A Year", a famous writer/illustrator of children's books takes on a school-leaver (and future novelist) as PA and "gofer".
You'd have nothing to lose (except the price of the advert) if you placed an advert in a magazine for writers. Well, THAT was an amazingly sweeping statement! You could potentially lose SO much, e.g. your respect for that certain established author, your hopes, your dreams... Sorry, I have an incorrigible silly streak.
p.s. I'd LOVE some support of the kind you envisage... but wouldn't be able to pay you for it. (And I'm not an "established author".)
I think there certainly is a demand for this type of service. When I have tried buying in administrative support, I found a negative cost benefit balance between the amount of time it takes to train the person the time you save. Sometimes it ends up seemingly easier to just do it yourself in the first place. I suppose it depends on how complicated the persons work is. The difficulty with most of the virtual PA/Sec type services is that they cover such a wide range of customers that they cannot provide the type of bespoke response that most people require.
I'm not sure from your question if you were suggesting that your career change would be to provide PA services to authors or that you wanted to purchase such services. Anyhow, I hope the above is helpful.