The Daily Cross Hatch interviews Jeff Smith and instead of spending too much time on SHAZAM, goes back to the early years:

I had all sorts of business plans. My wife made me sit down and write a business plan, before she was ready to commit to the company. One of the business plans was proving that I could make money. I had to convince the bank that this was real. Part of the plan was that I was going to reprint the collection in books, to always keep the story available. I always wanted to do the big one volume edition, too. One of the things that I wanted to do was change the model of comics and make them restockable, instead of comics just being up on stands for a month and then coming down and going back into the longbox, after getting marked up a bit. I wanted this to be always there. You needed the early parts of the story to always be there, so when number one sold out, put 5,000 more out on the market. The next stage was to go into the trades, and keep those in stock. It was very necessary for people in the middle of the story to be able to very cheaply and very easily go back and get those. That was in my original business plan, and it was a bit of a fight with the retailers to get them to think that way.