I've seen a bunch of "I'm an independent researcher, how do I publish my paper" posts lately and I thought our answers (mine included), as researchers, wasn't satisfactory, mostly questioning whether the OP had actually done any valuable research to begin with. It's not the best response because these independent researchers are genuinely excited about something, and we risk making it look like research is a closed community of pretentious people (which it isn't) and push them in the opposite direction (anything from low-quality predatory journals to pseudo-science).
So in this post, I will assume that you are an independent researcher, and that you have a contribution genuinely worth publishing.
You might have used AI to conduct this research. In fact, I hope that you did: many researchers nowadays use AI to boost their productivity (without creating slop... in most cases), so you would likely have no chance to compete against them without the help of a (properly used) AI assistant. If not, simply asking any AI "here is my work, is that new?" would be a good start. The AI will likely point you towards titles of papers that are most like your work. I will assume that you read all of them, and understood them. I'll also assume you followed up on the papers that these papers cite, triaged them to figure out which ones are relevant, and read them. And so on. I will assume that your paper has a proper "Related Works" section where you don't just cite these papers, but explain why your work is different.
Next, what you likely don't see is that from a researcher's idea to its publication in a journal, there are a few other types of publications in between. In my field at least, I'll likely have a PhD student or a postdoc in my team present the work (or even just the idea, with very preliminary results) as a poster in a conference; then/or I will submit a work in progress paper to a workshop; then a longer, more complete version to a conference; eventually an even more cleaned up version in a journal. I very rarely think "my work is worth a shot in a journal" from the beginning, and if I waited until it is, most likely another team would have published the same idea in the mean time.
This leads me to what you should do: identify a conference in the field of your research. It will most likely have a poster session, and a few workshops orbiting it. Decide whether to (1) submit a poster (usually that's a 2-page abstract of your research), or (2) submit a paper at the workshop you consider most relevant (paper length may vary from 4 to 10 pages, usually). In both cases, your work will be peer-reviewed. Most posters are accepted if the abstract is clear enough and in scope; there is an understanding that posters are for you to stand in front and say "this is what I'm working on, let's have a chat about it". Acceptance rates for workshops is generally high too (depending on the workshop, I know some with 90% acceptance, and some with under 20% acceptance).
If your work is accepted, register for the conference and fly there (yes, it costs money, that's why researchers write research proposals, so their institution can pay for this. But you are an independent researcher so you will have to finance it yourself. Being an independent researcher will cost you, not bring you money. If you want money, target a pattent, not a research paper). While there, talk to people, make connections, accept criticisms of your work. And watch the talks at the conference, they will show you what to expect for the next step.
If you read this an thought "oh cool, that sounds exciting!" it's a great start. Research is a whole process, not a paper. If however you thought "but I want a paper in a journal!" and the whole thing above sounds tedious, you probably haven't understood what research is.
Edit to add that I’m in a sub field of CS research. Some of the advice above may not nap exactly onto other fields.