Taxonomy and Author Post issue

On our site we have a section that contains articles of our online publication written by several different authors. Knowing we did not want to give every one of those contributors an account, we opted to included a taxonomy called ‘writers. On our page posts we would like to have our main editor’s name appear as the_author_post unless there is a taxonomy checked. Below is the code we currently are using.

<?php if(taxonomy_exists('writers')){echo get_the_term_list($post->ID, 'writers');} else {
          ?>
<?php the_author_posts_link(); } ?>

Unfortunately the_post_author will not show up on pages where there is not a writer assigned to the post through the taxonomy. What are we missing in our if/else code.

Thanks in Advance.