My advice to writers? Glue yourself to an editor who is also starting out

The two factors that make a writer stay with a publishing house are money and the editorial relationship. At its best I would call that relationship a friendship. It can be genuinely heartbreaking for a editor to lose a valued author, painful to leave them when you go to another publishing house, bitter to hear how well, or badly, they are doing without you. But times change, fashions change, publishing houses get eaten up by other publishing houses, editors move, get promoted. Fired. Rehired. It happens. Then the wheel turns and you're back with your author again, if you are lucky.