50 years-old may be a good age for a mid-life crisis but it is also the perfect age to publish a novel designed to become a best-seller, according to a study of best-selling novels and their authors over the past half-century. The average age of writers in the year that their novels topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955–2004 was 50.5 years — according to a study conducted by Lulu (www.lulu.com). Below is a graph of the average age of bestselling authors over the last 50 years.