Stable Diffusion

I'm interested in creating art for a book, like art that goes alongside the text.

One of the difficult parts of this is that I want characters in the book to have a stable look and not change from image to image.

Is there a way to do this? I have experimented with different localized models and often there were artifacts and I couldn't get consistent results. I am mildly intelligent with running local models, but I am neither an expert nor a computer genius. I was able to do something like "character is pretty and tall with black hair" but each time that anything was generated, the character would look different.

It's been about a year since I last tried anything and since then technology has progressed. If I can't get the characters to look consistent from picture to picture, I'd rather not have images, as I can't afford an illustrator.