Author who is not a user - Does a module exist? I am about to write a custom module to allow for non-user authors (called Authors for the rest of this question). 

Use Case is really the corporate website


Person publishing content to the website is not the author
Actual authors are many and potentially multiple on a specific article
There is no reason to create the authors as users on the CMS


Functional suggestions/ideas


When editing an article the editor can select one or many "Authors"
for the article. 
If none is selected then the creator of the article
is displayed as the Author. 
Author would be used in place of User
when article displays on the front end. 
If configured Authors would
have a block on a node showing Author content fields (image, role
...). 
Users can be associated with an Author through an Entity
reference field.
Re-use profiles on corporate About the Team page


Am I crazy, does a module exist, should I just create them as system users with no privileges and use an existing module? Just seems wrong to give manage users rights to website editor so that they can edit these profiles.
The solution was clearly provided by @Clive in his comment:


  users only make sense in the context of authorisation. Since you don't
  want/need that, you should just create an 'Author' content type and
  use that to store your authors and use EntityReference to relate them
  as Nikhil suggested


If a logged in user needs to be associated with a user in order to pre-fill this author display field you could have an entity reference on the user profile page.
If this needs to be a module, use features module to export:


Author content type
Author entity reference on users
Author field base with form field and display handling


I never actually created a module for this.