Neither snow nor sleet keeps Chesapeake & Hudson’s Keith Arsenault from his appointed New England rounds: when PW caught up with Arsenault in March, the 2025 finalist for sales rep of the year had just navigated a late-spring blizzard while visiting bookstores in Maine.
Arsenault has repped independent publishers for Chesapeake & Hudson since 2019, but it’s his 33rd year in the book world. He spent a decade in book retail in Providence, R.I.; did marketing for Avalon Publishing Group in the Bay Area; and went to Publishers Group West in 2005.
While at PGW, Arsenault contacted Robert Macfarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris about The Lost Words, then a U.K. sensation. When Macfarlane told Arsenault the book needed a North American publisher, “I connected them with House of Anansi, one of our distribution clients, who signed it up,” Arsenault said. “You know that old adage ‘Never meet your heroes’? For me, it was the complete opposite.”
More recently, Arsenault has championed Guillaume Lecasble’s Lobster, translated from the French by Polly McLean (Dedalus Limited), a backlist hit about a lobster and a debutante who escape the Titanic. “It’s steamy, no pun intended,” said Arsenault, who added that he’s moved “a not-insignificant number of copies for a weird surrealist translated piece of crustacean erotica.”
Jana Nelson, publicity manager at Broadleaf Books, cheered Arsenault’s “relentless work ethic and boundless energy” when nominating him for rep of the year. After Arsenault read Ethan Tapper’s How to Love a Forest, Nelson wrote in her nomination, “he spent a day with the author at his forest preserve,” and orchestrated dozens of in-store events. The book became a New England Independent Booksellers Association bestseller and a Broadleaf success.
Arsenault appreciates these relationships. “People have asked me, ‘Could you see yourself working in sales in other fields?’ ” he said, “and my answer is always no.” He’s in it for “the ideas within the books and the connections with the buyers, so that they trust you when you tell them, ‘This is a book you shouldn't skip.’ ”
