Author saved as NULL when updating entries from a plugin
Josh Angell's suggestion did work, I was just testing it on an entry that already had been updated with a NULL author. (Thanks Josh!)

For the record, I used $currentAuthor = $currentKit-&gt;authorId; to get my previous author, and then set the author with $kit-&gt;authorId = $currentAuthor. This does seem to maintain the author entirely.