On a side note to the question of consistency in covers across all the books, I've started finding ways in which to do that already, as I did a bit of tinkering on book 3's cover again, and came up with this:
which in turn plays off the cover of book 2. Sure, it doesn't stick with book 1's design, but that was more a "pull it out of your **** at the last moment" concept, since I really had no idea what to do for the first cover. I may eventually though go back and correct that. ^_^