All right, so here are some of my books.
Other books I have are somewhat more in pages and some are less but what I have here is about the average.
It just seems to me that a good book would be around 350 pages.
without bibliography, table of contents or index.
I have also chosen books in a few different genres to show that the genre doesn't matter.
There are a few problems with your sample. The first and most obvious is that you've taken books from your own shelves. If you have a fondness for longer books, then that means your sample is unreliable. The next is that we don't know how you've chosen these samples: it could be you've purposely looked for longer books to prove your point. And you have to consider when those books were published. I've looked them up and while there might have been earlier editions for some of them, this is what I found:
Biography of Steve McQueen by Penina Spiegel, published 1987
Trumped - biography of Donald Trump by John R. O'Donnell, published 1991
Richard Burton - A Life by Melvyn Bragg, published 1989
Sir Francis Drake by John Sugden, published 1990
Roughing It - By Mark Twain, published 1872
Bill Graham Presents by Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield, published 1992
Legend, the life and death of Marilyn Monroe by Fred Lawrence Guiles, published 1984
Family Psychopathology edited by Luciano L'Abate, published 1997
Overlord (D-Day, June 6, 1944 by Max Hastings, published 2006
Operation Barbarossa by Bryan I. Fugate (eastern front) in 1941, published 1984
The Korean War by Donald Knox, published 1985
If you want to know how to get published in 1997, 1985 or 1872 then by all means use these books as your guide. But I assume you're hoping to find out how to best be published now, in 2015: in which case you're going to need some more contemporary examples, and rely on a sample which is less flawed than this.
Why would I review how to determine Word Count. I know how to add 2+2.
There's more to it than that.
Your word counts are way too high, and I think I've seen at least some of the reason why.
When you work out the word count you count up the average words per line, the average lines per page, and the number of pages, and multiply them together.
To get an accurate count, especially for a longer book, you have to count WPL and LPP over several pages.
Counting the WPL figure is easy. Count the words per line. Count fifty lines, at least. Count them on different pages, in different chapters, and make sure you're not choosing the lines you count because they look right to you: have a system. Because people often choose lines which look fuller or emptier, depending on what they're hoping to find. Completely subconsciously. It's astonishing how regularly this happens.
That LLP figure often trips people up, though, as you have to take into account the white space left by ending paragraphs. So you count the LLP down the centre of the page, not the right or left of the page, and where you pass over the final line of a paragraph you only count the line if there's a word at that point on the page. If there's white space, you don't count it.
Counting pages is another one. Don't rely on the number of pages given in the contents of the book. Count the actual pages. Count at around the half-way point (vertically) and when you reach the end of a chapter, if the words end above this point then don't count the page. Make an allowance for chapter beginnings too: count up how many chapters there are, work out what proportion of the page is blank at the start of each chapter, and multiply the two together. This should give you the number of pages to lose off your total to take into account this blank space.
As you've already said, ignore appendices, endnotes or footnotes, and other extraneous material.
Are people here getting kind of insecure or something like am I putting fear into people thinking that they have to write a longer book than they thought?
No. We can see you're doing this wrong and we're trying to help you, so that you can do better for yourself.
Non-fiction is my business. I've worked as an editor and writer for over thirty years now. I've had over forty books published; I've edited lots of books and have signed up a lot too. I know the word-counts you're coming up with are not what's required.
Well, a book is done, when a book is done. There can be no short cuts taken. You do your best for each chapter and take as much data as you can find for it and plug it in. You want to include everything you can find about your topic, length doesn't matter. You can always trim it down later on. I'm so glad I am over those legal cases I had to go through, I really got burned out from it. My next chapter is going a lot easier. There will be more legal cases coming later on but hopefully they won't be so lengthy and complicated. I probably read 300 pages of legal documents not including newspaper articles just to get a 10 page chapter out of it and I had to go over and over and over stuff to co-ordinate the correct details. In court cases, stories through testimony are not told all at once. They are told sporadically and so I had to pull the stuff out from different sections to put it all together and then co-ordinate those details with the newspaper articles. It didn't help either that there were often different versions of the details.
It sounds like you're doing your research thoroughly and diligently. I wish more writers did this. It will improve the quality of your final book. But be aware that publishers will struggle to publish a book which is significantly longer than the norm: not only are they more costly to edit, they are more costly to produce and distribute. More pages = more paper and ink; bulkier books are more expensive to ship to bookshops; and they take up more space on bookshop shelves, so bookshops aren't so keen on them. Bookshops like to have variety on their shelves and unless a book is exceptional they'll be reluctant to stock it if it takes up the space of two of a more usual length.
You obviously need to have a beginning, middle and end to your book: you can't end it halfway through the story. But might it be possible for you to split it into more than one book, so that you can include all this detail and not have to worry about cutting it in ways which would diminish it?