Thanks for the feedback ! Both of your questions can be answered by knowing that you can only flip the next card or the Tome when you ACHIEVE a feat, not when you take the feat action. I should find a way to make it visually clearer I think.
The Tome is meant to be a Push your luck mechanism. When you achieve a feat, you may want to flip the next card to have a new action and more chances to place renown, or you may choose to play it safe and flip the whole Tome to be sure to score points in Evening and not remove half of your renown.
In practice it is really complicated to get all 9 feat actions, because to achieve the feat it usually requires more than the action given by the feat. Also you need to have 8 renown on the map already in order to set-up a Tome with 9 feat cards, that would be quite difficult.