Answered plainly, including the awkward one.

You do. You hold the copyright in what you produce, you can export the manuscript and the finished files at any time, and nothing you make is used to train a model by us. Cancelling does not take your files away.

The mechanical rules a retailer applies before a human sees the book: bleed present and correct, gutter wide enough for the page count, spine width matching the final extent, images above the minimum effective resolution, fonts embedded and subset, and no elements inside the safe area. It cannot tell you whether the book is good — it tells you whether it will be accepted.

Because the stages take wildly different amounts of time, so a percentage is least accurate exactly when someone is watching it. Ninety per cent for four minutes tells you nothing. "Writing chapter 7 of 24" tells you where you are and roughly how long is left.

Yes, at every stage, and the outline stage is where structural changes are cheapest. You can regenerate a single chapter without disturbing the others, and accept or reject the editing pass chapter by chapter.

The rules live in a registry, not in the code, so a changed requirement is a data update rather than a release. Books already published keep a record of the specification they went out with.

It is encrypted at rest, and separated at the database level so one account's work is unreachable from another's — enforced by the database itself rather than by application code. One question we have not finished answering is the retention policy of the upstream services that process text during generation; we are settling it before launch rather than after, and the privacy page says so plainly.

No. The specification is chosen for you from the trim size and binding you pick, and the pre-flight check catches the rest. The vocabulary is on this site because it is what the product actually controls, not because you have to learn it.

Yes — that is the white-label programme. Your own domain, your own name and palette, your own sign-in credentials so the consent screen carries your name, and your own merchant account so money settles to you. Your customers have no way to tell we exist.