July 18, 2026 Matthew Pfeifer No Comments

Forty-nine lovely towns get driven past. These fifty get talked about.

We have spent years at Creative City Developments asking one question: why do some small towns become places the world travels to, while prettier ones a few miles away get driven past? The answer became a book. Only Here: How 50 unremarkable towns made themselves into top-tier destinations arrives August 31.

It is fifty case studies of towns that had no natural reason to be a destination and built one anyway. Monaco made glamour out of a nearly broke rock. Leavenworth, Washington, a failing mill town, rebuilt itself as a Bavarian village. A Pennsylvania town of a few thousand runs a national event around a groundhog. Every chapter lays out what the town started with, what it decided to do, and why it worked, read through the Visitor Impact Score, the framework we use to measure how a place turns what it has into a reason to come.

It is part travel book and part playbook. If you lead a town, sit on a chamber or tourism board, or work in economic development, it is fifty proofs that the pattern is available to any community willing to do the work.

The Kindle edition is available to pre-order now at $9.99, and it is delivered to your device on release day. The paperback and hardcover go on sale the same morning. Pre-order the Kindle edition, or read more about the book.

A destination is not found. It is made. And it can be made again.