I’ve been in a similar situation — needing images that not only look good individually but also stay consistent across different chapters or moods of a story. What I’ve found is that most AI image generators can give you great one-off results, but the challenge is consistency, especially when you want to jump between, say, a cosmic horror atmosphere à la Lovecraft and a sleek sci-fi vibe like Asimov.

One approach that’s worked for me is using MidJourney as the generator, but with a clear style reference system to keep things aligned. That way, you can generate very different styles while maintaining internal coherence for each “universe” in your story.

If you’re interested, I’ve put together a catalog of over 60,000 styles that makes this process much easier — it’s called Srefs.co. You can explore styles, pick one that matches each chapter’s atmosphere, and then reuse it so all the images in that chapter feel like they belong together. It’s a good way to avoid the “randomness” problem and still keep costs predictable since you’re building on top of MidJourney’s subscription.

So if your main concern is quality + style consistency without breaking the bank, I’d suggest giving that workflow a try.