Lee Yeongdo

Lee Yeongdo (born 1972) is a Korean novelist known for his work in fantasy and science fiction genre.

Lee was born in 1972 in Busan, South Korea, the first child of two brothers.

When Lee was 2 years old, his family moved to Masan in South Gyeongsang Province where he has lived since.

As a child he read heavily in various subjects.

Mid-1990s were when fantasy and science fiction literature was just being introduced to Korea.

In 1991 he entered Kyungnam University where he studied Korean language and literature.

He started writing seriously from 1993, but didn't think that he would be writing novels.

He is best known for his Dragon Raja series of fantasy novels which is also his debut work, serialised on an online forum from 1997 and published on its completion in 1998.

At the time Dragon Raja was first published, Korean readership for fantasy genre(specifically its medievalist form) was considered unsubstantial and unaccounted for by press.

But Dragon Raja has sold close to 2 million books in 4 languages.

This was a significant feat for the fantasy genre in Korea where the annual circulation of domestic literature and fiction titles as a whole, ranges between 12~20 million copies.

Dragon Raja's success has prompted a rapid growth of Korean fantasy and science fiction genre, and contributed to the growing acceptance of web fiction, referred to as "Internet literature", both by the country's general public and literary world.

Lee is currently one of the best-selling fantasy writers in Korea.

Lee serialized Dragon Raja from October 1997 to April 1998, referring to himself as "typer" as he typed and didn't pen his work.

The chapters quickly gained popularity and Lee's readers began waiting online for Lee to post the new ones.

Lee usually posted his works well after midnight, and Lee's readers began calling themselves zombies, and Lee the Necromancer summoning them online every night.

Through its 6-month running, Dragon Raja accumulated 900,000 hits, and its publishing rights were soon taken by Golden Bough, an imprint of Minumsa Publishing Group.

Beginning in May 1998, the novel was published in 12 paperback volumes.

In the midst of his debut success, Lee began typing his second novel Future Walker, a sequel to Dragon Raja.

Future Walker was serialised on the same forum from October 1998 to June 1999, and published in August by Golden Bough in 7 paperback volumes.

Lee continued to use Hitel's serial forum for writing his novels such as Polaris Rhapsody, The Bird That Drinks Tears, The Bird That Drinks Blood and a few short stories.

All of these stories were published upon completion (and deleted from the forum) or collected in later publications by Golden Bough, which remains Lee's publisher today.

This practice of online serialization and getting published based on its popularity (estimated by the work's view counts) surged in fantasy, science, romance fiction in Korea.

Lee's publisher Golden Bough has run an online community from 1999 where the publisher and Lee's fans discuss and actively participate in publication of Lee's current and upcoming works.

Online forums dedicated to these genres opened in hundreds by 2000 attracting prospective writers, and caused the boom of the Internet literature.

Outside the forum he published a short story Over the Horizon as an e-book in 2000, and wrote a series of children's stories for RedPen study books published by Kyowon Co. Ltd.

The popularization of HTTP and the Web browser caused the decline of Hitel and other commercial online services, and Lee's readership on the forum was greatly reduced.

There the publisher ran limited edition campaigns for Polaris Rhapsody in 2000 and for Dragon Raja 's 10-year anniversary in 2008.

But Lee continued to use Hitel forum to 2005, completing The Bird That Drinks Blood, the last of his multi-volume novels as of July 2014.

Between 2005 and 2008 Lee wrote several short stories for science fiction magazines, including Regarding the Translation of KAIWAPANDOM which has been translated into English.

There were talks of publishing Dragon Raja in the United States in 2006, to which Lee's response was "I don't want to disgrace our country."

After the forum was closed in 2007 Lee said in an interview that he was searching for a place to serialize his work online, saying that "the realtime feedback from the readers is a big joy, and I miss that feeling."

But he found it difficult to find a replacement to the old text-only forum, which was "easier for [him] to access because [the forum]'s white text on blue limited one's expression to text, and it enabled [him] to show individuality purely through words."

The web's increased sense of community and of the writer's presence thereby, made it more difficult for him.

"I believe words and people are separate," Lee said, "some people may like a writing and want to find about the writer, but I don't."

Lee remembered that "if you asked people what is fantasy, they would say 'Isn't that like western martial arts'" in a 2008 interview.

He found the genre attractive and decided to try a story with it.

It was also when various online service providers similar to CompuServe in United States (but different in its interface being text-only) were emerging.

Lee joined one such provider, Hitel, to start posting on its Serial forum what would be the first chapters of Dragon Raja.

In 2011, a campaign for the new hardback edition for Future Walker has been announced.