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I would say it's a very difficult time to be a working professional writer. I'm not sure there ever was an easy time. (I'm not dissing semipro or amateur writers, by the way; I'm just talking for the moment about the professional aspects of writing. Fiction writing, because that's what I know.)
Traditional paper publishing is still the way most money is being made, but less and less of that money is getting to the midlist authors. (The bestselling authors seem to be doing just fine.) Distribution has gone all to hell with just a few companies controlling most of the market, so many books (my own included) no longer get decent distribution. Lots of good writers with good track records are seeing a steady decline in sales with new books. Publishers have been slow to catch on to ebook publishing, and still aren't doing a very good job of it.
On the other hand, there are probably all kinds of opportunities in the wildly shifting landscape for those agile enough, or lucky enough (and luck is a huge factor in this) to catch the right wave. I don't need to say much about indie publishing to people here, and I'm hardly an expert on the subject. Cory Doctorow, who already enjoys huge popularity, is trying his own indie publishing experiment. It's probably safe to say that the authors who also have a streak of marketing acumen will do better than those who really are at their best just writing, and who depend on others for the marketing.
On the other other hand, the explosion of new outlets for new and indie writers means it's harder and harder for anyone to stand out, and harder to sift the wheat from the chaff.
And then there's the increasing competition from other forms of entertainment. Do I worry that novels and other forms of fiction might be a dying (or at least fading) art form? Yeah, I do. I don't think it will go away anytime soon. But it seems dominated more and more every year by the blockbusters, while the relative audience for other stuff--at least for the individual work--shrinks. My own chosen field, science fiction books, is definitely dwindling.
Could all of this change next year? Absolutely. But how? That's the question we all wish we could answer.
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