The only question is: having gotten a few eyeballs, how do you hold them? I'm pretty sure the answer is: you don't. They come, they go. Having once done something interesting, perhaps I can later continue to be interesting, but the key insight (besides hexapodia) is that you don't keep eyeballs just because you want them. That's putting the cart before the horse -- as Paul Bunyan discovered in my story.

So really, my experience mirrored my story. How ... meta. And very unexpected.