When something goes wrong

Most stops here are designed to be recoverable, and nearly all of them give your credits back on their own. This page says what each one means, so a pause reads as a pause rather than as lost work.

The rule underneath all of it

Nothing is charged after the fact, and a failure refunds itself.

Every generation is charged before it is queued — so you are never billed for something that could not start — and if it fails, returns nothing usable, or errors part way, the charge is put back automatically. An unusable result is never saved. You do not have to ask for the refund, and you do not have to check that it happened.

If you ever see a charge without a result and no refund beside it within a few minutes, that is worth reporting. It is not normal.

A book says a chapter never came back

You will see an amber banner on the book: "1 chapter was sent to be written and never came back — usually a restart on our side."

That is exactly what it means. The chapter was paid for and the worker writing it stopped before it finished — almost always because something restarted on our end, not because of anything in your book.

• It fixes itself within about half an hour. A sweep runs every fifteen minutes and gives up on any chapter that has been out for more than thirty minutes, returns its credits, and pauses the book so you can ask again.
• You do not have to wait. The banner carries a Start it again button that does the same thing immediately. It asks first, because it marks the chapter failed — then the credits come back and you can write it again.

Thirty minutes is deliberately longer than a chapter can legitimately take, so a slow chapter is never mistaken for a lost one.

A book is paused

A paused book always says why, and the reason is written in plain words rather than an error code. Some pauses are just a rest — the book is waiting for you and nothing is wrong:

• Paused at your request — you stopped it. Nothing more is written until you say so.
• The chapter is done — it wrote what you asked for and stopped there.

The rest need something from you, and each one is shown with the way out beside it:

What it says	What to do
The spending ceiling you set for this book has been reached	Raise the budget in the book's settings. Nothing was charged beyond the ceiling.
The workspace is out of AI credits	Top up. Writing stopped before charging for something it could not deliver.
The last step did not complete and its credits were returned	Ask for it again. You have already been refunded.
Some chapters have no brief yet	Ask for the briefs again, then carry on.

Nothing already written is ever lost to a pause. The book resumes from the same stage.

You ran out of credits mid-book

The book pauses and says so on its page, and picks up from where it stopped once you top up. A monthly Auto-Pilot series emails you once when it stops, not every hour.

See Credits for what each operation costs and how the two pools are spent.

"Page expired"

Your sign-in sat idle long enough for its security token to expire, so the form was refused rather than sent. Nothing was saved and nothing was charged. Sign in again and the page works normally.

A score says "not measured yet"

That is the honest answer, not a fault. Some factors need history before they mean anything — seasonality needs about a year, trend needs weeks. Rather than invent a number, the page names what it could not measure and why. It fills in as readings accumulate.

The same applies to a tracked title with a single reading: it shows no movement rather than a made-up zero.

Your alerts have gone quiet

Silence means the checks ran and nothing moved far enough to matter. An alert is raised only when a change clears its threshold, so quiet is a result — not a sign that tracking has stopped. The dashboard shows when each watch was last checked.

The advisor works the same way: no evidence, no suggestion.

A cover came out wrong

Redraw it. The cover generated automatically with a book is a starting point, not a decision you are stuck with — the Covers page lets you draw it again with a different template, prompt or title treatment, as often as you like.

Research came back with nothing

Amazon occasionally refuses a request, and a search that collected nothing is not charged for what it did not return. Try it again in a few minutes. If a particular niche returns nothing repeatedly, that itself is worth telling us about.

The KDP extension is not filling anything

Work through these in order:

1. Check it is signed in. The extension holds a token from your account; if it has been revoked or has expired, it fills nothing. Sign it in again from Settings → Extension.
2. Check you are on the right page. It fills KDP's title-setup pages, and only those.
3. Check the book is ready. A book still missing something the listing needs cannot fill a form. The Publishing page names what each book still needs.

See The KDP extension.

Something showed an error page

If a page fails outright, the error page says so plainly and offers a way back. Nothing part-way through was charged for. Reload first — a single failed request is usually just that — and if the same page fails twice, tell us what you were doing and roughly when.

Reporting something

The more precisely you can say what you pressed, on which book, and roughly when, the faster it can be traced. Every charge, refund and generation is on the record against your workspace, so a time and a title is usually enough to find it.