I Needed a Marketing Machine; It Turned Out to Be My Town’s Facebook Mom Group

My town’s mom Facebook group has almost 13,000 members, and we’re often the butt of the joke. It has nothing to do with our group specifically. We’re the butt of the joke the way all mom Facebook groups are, the way mom groups have always been.

(3 Ways to Fall in Love With Book Marketing.)

I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. In the collective imagination, we’re the wives on Mad Men, drinking while pregnant. Too invested in Bunco, too invested in rosé. Too serious about the PTA and youth sports. We’re “keeping ourselves busy” in the same helpful way our kids do when the adults are doing something important.

Because we’re moms, our group has certain rules, things like “no profanity” and “no politics.” Another one is that you’re only allowed to post about your small business on Wednesdays.

One Wednesday last March, I was coming off a call with my publicity team about my novel coming out in April. We were discussing our pre-publication strategy, which was going the way I suspect it does for many authors: The enthusiasm is high, but the expectations are not.

Because it’s 2026, and in 2026, people aren’t reading books. They’re scrolling TikTok. They’re watching Instagram reels. They’re fighting with bots on X until they admit defeat and get invested in sourdough bread. This book is my baby, but as a mom, you learn pretty quickly that few people care about your baby as much as you do.

Or at least that’s what I thought. When I posted about my book on Small Business Wednesday, I was hoping a few readers might see it—maybe even a book club, if the timing was right. I didn’t expect more than that because the post mirrored my life at the moment: hopeful but messy, with a palpable air of panic. “I really can’t overstate how bad of a salesperson I am,” I admitted, “but I do know where to find moms—ha!”

The first comment came immediately. Then the next, and the next. When I got to five, I got in bed and told my husband the post was a success.

The next morning, there were 75 comments and hundreds of likes. I checked my rank on the Amazon bestseller list, and my book—which had been sitting comfortably at “who dis?” for months—was in the top one percent of all books on the site.

And people were still commenting. “I don’t even read,” said some. “But we got you!” They were tagging their friends, tagging their book clubs. One wanted to know if I could make the post public so they could share it, which they did. The post made its way around Peloton book clubs and homeschooling mom groups and sister group chats.

It stayed like this all day on Thursday, and then the next and the next. My book did something that usually requires a bestseller’s publicity budget, which I didn’t have. What I had is something just as powerful: my mom group. And once a mom group activates, it can’t be stopped.

Take Reese Witherspoon for example, who built a brand around a book club, the cornerstone of mom group culture. Reese recently sold her company Hello Sunshine for $900 million. Or Dani Austin, founder of the haircare company Divi, who started in her dorm room and ended up in Target. Her astronomic rise to success began with YouTube makeup videos and later, “goofy mom” content. Her Instagram bio now reads, and I quote, “one big inside joke,” because that’s what people sometime don’t realize about us: Mom groups might be the punchline, but we’re in on the joke.

We know the strength in numbers because once you’re a mom, that’s sometimes all you’ve got. We form communities because we need communities, because how else would we survive the madness of hand, foot, and mouth outbreaks at the daycare, or the ludicrous number of elementary school spirit weeks? We get good at accepting help and even better at giving it, because when one of us is fighting the Amazon algorithm, so are the rest of us. We’ll battle the corporate machine between PTA meetings and Bunco nights, then go home and dress our kids up like Benjamin Franklin one random Tuesday because—surprise!—it’s “American entrepreneur week.”

And then we finally sit down to Facebook and type out a plea for help.

When I made my post, it wasn’t “American entrepreneur week” at our school, but it was almost Easter, so I’d spent days filling plastic Easter eggs in 20-egg increments. Spring is also a busy time for my law firm, where I work as a patent agent, and I’d just billed a long eight hours at work. Bedtime had run longer than usual because my daughter has recently discovered some effective new delay tactics, most  of which involve her Tonie box. I wrote the post with “I am Moana” drifting down the hallway (a banger, actually) and my basset hound puppy dozing deeply beside me, having just barely not eaten a sock. 

I was exhausted, and I asked for help, and here’s who answered: a middle school science teacher, just as tired as I was, who made me some graphics, then reached out to a local news station on my behalf. A mom whose nephew had recently had surgery on the other coast. She didn’t know how to sell books, but she’d fundraised his trip across the country, so maybe she could help. Moms I knew, and moms I didn’t, all saw a problem and decided to solve it. Because we’re moms, and that’s what we do: Everything one random Tuesday. And then on Wednesday, we activate.

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