From an artistic and literary perspective humanoid aliens are a good thing because their emotionally closer to man. Or even if they closely resembled any of the sorts of mammals we keep as pets. The dynamic range of emotion they can express makes it more capable to have the basic connection that allows not just the main character to have a meaningful interpersonal relationship with, but the audience.

Typically speaking, anything far from being human and on into something akin to the grotesque means there's no emotional connectivity up front, it'd all rely then on the characters filling particular character niches to be liked by the audience. Otherwise they're kind of ignored. Either they become sarcastic sidekicks or big up some kind of meme value to serve as an introduction to them.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5Fjc1hBwuE[/youtube]

But "meme value" alone is unquanitified and it's easier to make people cry than it is to laugh, so I've been told. So I wouldn't rely on it. So the only other option is to somehow be an antithesis to what would be the human-like races and basically cast yourself as a villain, because that's what they'd be read as; like a Cthulu.