How to Sell Your Family to the Aliens by Paul Noth

Hi, Paul! Thank you for visiting Watch. Connect. Read. to share the cover for How to Sell Your Family to the Aliens and to finish my sentences.

Paul Noth: Thanks for having me, Mr Schu. It’s an honor.

Publication Date: April 3, 2018

The cover illustration for How to Sell Your Family to the Aliens depicts a kid with a lizard on his head happily counting money while a tentacled beast carries his family into the sky. It's designed to to appeal to other eight-to-twelve-year-olds with lizards on their heads.

Happy Conklin Jr. is your average ten-year-old with a beard who sells his family to extraterrestrials. Actually, he’s a lot like me when I was a kid. I have two brothers and six sisters, so life was a constant quest for a minute to myself. Hap feels the same way, but carries things a bit further than I ever did.

Hap’s family is weird. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. They’re unusual people. Grandma tested products on Hap and his siblings, which is why he has a beard and his sister Kayla has an imaginary bee named Alphonso. Personally, I think Kayla has a better attitude about it than Hap. She likes being different. He hates it.

I wrote How to Sell Your Family to the Aliens because I thought the title was funny, then I thought the first page was funny, and then I kept needing to know what happens. Sometimes it felt more like reading a book than writing one. I hope readers have as much fun in there as I did. 

Mr. Schu, you should have asked me about the sequels! There are at least two more Conklin family books coming. I was really hoping you'd ask me about them, because their contents are still top-secret. I’ve always wanted to be pressed for information that I’m not at liberty to divulge.

Paul Noth’s cartoons have appeared regularly in The New Yorker  since 2004. He has created short animated films for Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and been an animation consultant for Saturday Night Live. Visit him online at www.paulnoth.com and on Twitter at @PaulNoth.