English language publisher thrives in UAE

The UAE's English-language magazine industry did not have an easy birth.
It was late spring in 1979, and Ian Fairservice, a 22-year-old former assistant manager at a Dubai hotel who had just quit his steady day job for a new career in publishing, had just finished making up the proofs for the inaugural May issue of What's On, complete with a cover collage featuring the singers Rod Stewart and Alice Cooper, when he received some bad news. The Government had decided to ban the sale of alcohol at independent restaurants and pubs, rendering inaccurate the dozens of ads for those establishments inside the monthly entertainment magazine.
"What a lot of people don't know is that, back in the 1970s, in fact right through until What's On was launched, all the restaurants had beer and wine," Mr Fairservice says. "Alcohol was not controlled or in any way restricted to just five-star hotels, as it came to be from 1979 onwards. Prior to that, you could go into fantastic little pizza restaurants or pubs on the roadside and you could have your lunch and a bottle of beer or a glass of wine."
The Government's move kickstarted the country's hospitality industry, as an average of one five-star hotel a month sprang up over the next three years, but it was nearly a death blow to the fledgling English-language magazine publishing business.
Mr Fairservice and his colleagues had to push the launch date back a month to give them time to remove references to alcohol from the dozens of ads, restaurant reviews and entertainment guides, knowing that many of the establishments they featured would not survive to see the second issue.
"One of the last things I did before it was published was, when we were taking these other things off, I took my name off, because I thought, 'If this is the only one ever, at least no one will know who produced it'," he says.
Thirty years later, What's On is still the biggest-selling magazine in the country, and few in Dubai's media world do not know Mr Fairservice's name.
Motivate Publishing, the company that he founded and owns with Obaid Humaid al Tayer, the Minister of State for Financial Affairs, now publishes 24 magazines and more than 250 books, and employs more than 200 people.
Mr Fairservice has spent 20 years on the board of the UAE chapter of the International Advertising Association, four of them as its president.
But his initial nervousness about entering a life dedicated to the printed word was understandable. He had grown up in the hospitality business, helping his parents run a small hotel in London, and the riskier business of writing was not something they looked upon favourably.
"My interest was in writing, but I'd been talked out of a journalism career, really, by my father, who persuaded me that it was highly competitive," Mr Fairservice says. "There was a sort of feeling in my family that if you worked in a hotel, you'd never be out of work, and you'd always get three square meals."
But it was his literary interests, particularly in T?E Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, that helped persuade him to take his first job as the assistant manager at the Excelsior Hotel in Dubai in 1978.
The Emirates of the 1970s would be barely recognisable to today's inhabitants.
"There were very, very few properly made-up roads," Mr Fairservice says. "It didn't matter if you had a four-wheel-drive car or an ordinary car, nobody drove anywhere without ropes, spades, water and everything required to pull someone out of the sand."
There were also no English-language publications, an absence he became familiar with when trying to advertise for his hotel.
"The only printed media was something which was run off a Roneo [mimeograph] machine and stapled together and sold at the traffic lights, which was one-day-old print-offs from the Reuters bulletin," he says. "If I wanted to advertise my hotel, I'd have to make 5,000 copies of my own leaflet, drive to Sharjah, which was a long way on not very well made-up roads, and then I'd have to pay money for them to staple the leaflets into the day-old news. And that was the only print advertising that existed in 1978."
The next year the Khaleej Times was founded, followed by Gulf News, but still there were no magazines in English.
When the hotel where Mr Fairservice had been working changed management, he took the opportunity to start his own business, part of which included launching What's On.
After a rocky start, What's On grew, becoming the foundation of a business that expanded to include advertising, design, public relations and events management, while, in the early years being subsidised by a mobile disco that members of the staff ran at hotels in the evenings.
"We were basically the jack of all trades, master of none, in media, events and advertising," Mr Fairservice says. "We muddled along rather successfully for four or five years like that."
Then in 1985, Emirates Airline was launched, and it selected Motivate as the publisher of its inflight magazine. Mr Fairservice recognised this as an opportunity to refocus the business. He shut down the advertising, PR and events arms, and focused solely on publishing.
"Once we made it very clear that we were focusing our attention on publishing, our publishing business grew very quickly," he says.
In addition to Emirates Woman, which was founded in the early 1980s, Motivate launched magazines for Dubai and Abu Dhabi airports, and began publishing books. It was through the book publishing side of the business that Mr Fairservice perhaps got closest to living out the Arabian fantasies he had while reading T?E Lawrence as a British schoolboy.
In 1990, Wilfred Thesiger, the British explorer, author and photographer of whom Mr Fairservice had long been a fan, came to the UAE for an exhibition of his photography sponsored by the British Council.
"I asked him what, if anything, remained unfulfilled for him, and he said that he's always dreamt that one day, the very Arabs who he had written about in Arabian Sands would be able to read the book in their own language," Mr Fairservice says.
Within a year, Mr Fairservice had secured the worldwide rights to publish the book in Arabic, which began a 13-year relationship during which Motivate put out 12 of Thesiger's books. Many of them had fallen out of print during the years that Thesiger - once famous in the UK for Arabian Sands - lived in a remote area of Kenya.
"The strange thing about Wilfred is that between the early 1960s and late 1980s, he completely went off the radar in the UK," Mr Fairservice says. "He was really quite well known, and then he went to live in Africa, in Maralal, in northern Samburuland, and because of that he stopped publishing any new book and he completely left the public consciousness. Many people thought he had died."
Mr Fairservice credits Motivate's publishing of Thesiger's books throughout the 1990s as the reason for the complete renaissance of interest in the author, which eventually led to Thesiger's knighthood in 1995. L
ike Thesiger, Mr Fairservice appreciates the advantages of living in a place that is a few years behind the rest of the world when it comes to the most technologically advanced aspects of his business.
"I don't think this country is going to be immune to the advance of digital media, and I do think that social networking, as a medium, is going to have an effect here," he says. "But I think it will be later, rather than sooner, because in terms of sophistication, we've still got some catching up to do."
Unlike the West, the recession may be having the effect of delaying, rather than accelerating, print's slow death in the UAE at the hands of the internet.
Motivate has put back the launch of two planned online portals this year because of the economic downturn. It also suspended one print title, Society Dubai, late last year and has pushed back the planned launch of Men's Health, but in general Mr Fairservice says his staff is only down about 10 per cent since last year.
He is expecting the region to recover faster than the rest of the world, and when it does, he expects print to have many profitable years ahead of it, at least for those who are not in the business of printing newspapers.
"I think as far as the printed word is concerned, books remain safe," he says. "For magazines, there are challenges, but in my experience, second to a book, people will continue to like the experience of a magazine. The connection of holding a magazine which reflects its subject matter - like a high-gloss fashion magazine, or a business magazine with matte paper and serious photographs - is going to be around for some time to come."
khagey@thenational.ae